Collier, Mike and Thompson, Brian (2012) Their Colours and Their Forms. [Show/Exhibition]

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❦ Their Colours and their Forms Artists’ Responses to Wordsworth

❦

Carol McKay and John Strachan

Art Editions North The Wordsworth Trust Published by aen (Art Editions North, an imprint of the University of Sunderland) and the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, Cumbria, 2013

Distributed by Cornerhouse Publications, 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, m1 5nh, England. Their Colours and their Forms: Artists’ Responses to Wordsworth is an exhibition shown at the Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere, between 2 February and 10 March 2013. Copyright in this compilation by Carol McKay and John R. Strachan 2013. Copyright in This mixed-media exhibition, featuring the work of a number of notable the contributions remains with the contributors. contemporary artists, offers a series of imaginative responses to Wordsworth. It uses Wordsworth’s life and poetry — and the manuscripts of William and Dorothy Edited by Mike Collier and John Strachan with assistance from Janet Ross displayed in the Museum — as the inspiration for sculpture, fine art, poetry, Designed by Manny Ling calligraphy, electronic music, conceptual installation and a number of ‘creative walks’ in the Grasmere area. All of the artworks are specially conceived for the exhibition,

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or which features the work of artists, composers and creative writers including Tim transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or Brennan, Mike Collier, David Harsent, Manny Ling, John Strachan, Robert Strachan, otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Brian Thompson, Sam Wiehl and Tony Williams. Their Colours and their Forms is curated by Mike Collier, John Strachan and Brian A cip record for this book is available from the British Library Thompson in collaboration with the School of Humanities and Creative Industries at isbn 978-1-906832-06-3 Bath Spa University and w.a.l.k. (Walking, Art, Landskip and Knowledge: www.walk. uk.net), an interdisciplinary research centre based at the University of Sunderland which examines the way in which cultural practitioners engage with the world through walking). The curators are grateful for the financial sponsorship of the universities A of Bath Spa, Northumbria and Sunderland and for the support and assistance of Jeff E N Cowton mbe and his colleagues at the Wordsworth Trust. This book was designed by ART EDIT- IONS NORTH Manny Ling.

WALK Walking Art Landskip & Knowledge

|  | |  | Acknowledgements

Their Colours and their Forms: Artists’ Responses to Wordsworth forms part of a programme of exhibitions at the Wordsworth Museum that is generously supported by the John Ellerman Foundation. Much of the prior research described here, including the timeline of The Prelude, the other artists’ responses and the reports, was supported by the Renaissance Designation Development Fund, administered by Arts Council England.

We are grateful to the Wordsworth Trust for the use of images and text: Wordsworth’s The sounding cataract Skates (p.35), ‘Frozen River’ by Brian Thompson (p.12), extracts from Dorothy Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, Wordsworth’s journal (p.25 & p.44), ‘Good Friday 1’ and ‘Good Friday 2’ (p.27), The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, ‘Gowbarrow, Misty Morning, Daffodils’ (p.24), ‘The Ring’, ‘The Ring (1)’ and ‘The Their colours and their forms, were then to me Ring (2)’ (p.25, p.43, p.45) by Mike Collier, the extract from a letter written by Dorothy An appetite; a feeling and a love. Wordsworth to Jane Marshall (p.53), ‘Wordsworth on Helvellyn’ by B.R. Haydon (p.99), ‘Tea and the Wordsworths’ by Rob Kesseler and ‘Idiot Boy’ by Heather Bowring (p.102), William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles and ‘Daffodils 1’ by Mike Collier (p.103). The timeline of The Prelude (pp.104–105) is above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye courtesy of Alex Butterworth and Stefanie Posavec and the quote from The Literal Body during a Tour. July 13, 1798’, ii. 77–81. by Lavina Greenlaw (p.49) is provided with permission of the poet.

We are also grateful to the following individuals: Dr Steve May, Dean of the School of Humanities and Cultural Industries, Bath Spa University Professor Richard Terry, University of Northumbria at Newcastle Dr Jane Moore, Cardiff University Graeme Thompson, Dean of Faculty of Arts, Design and Media, University of Sunderland Art Editions North with Mike Collier and Peter Davies

|  | |  | Contents

Page 10 Foreword

Nicholas Roe

Page 12 Introduction

Carol McKay and John Strachan, Their Colours and their Forms: Artists’ Responses to Wordsworth

Page 36 The Artists

Page 37 Tim Brennan Page 42 Mike Collier Page 48 David Harsent Page 54 Manny Ling Page 60 John Strachan Page 64 Robert Strachan and Sam Wiehl Page 70 Brian Thompson Page 76 Tony Williams

Page 80 Contextual Biographical Essay

John Strachan, Wordsworth at Goslar, Cockermouth and Hawkshead

Page 100 Afterword

Jeff Cowton, ‘An inspiration for us all’

Manny Ling ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, Page 106 Notes on Contributors July 13, 1798’ by Wordsworth 2013 Chinese Xuan paper, Sumi ink, Chinese brushes, metal leaves, Manuscript Chronicle nibs |  | 33.5 x 47 cms (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) |  | Foreword

No portrait this, with Academic air! This is the poet and his poetry. Portrait of William Wordsworth 1806 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Edridge (1769–1821) Pencil and Watercolour 15.5 x 12.5 cms ‘On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B. R. Haydon’ (1842)

Their Colours and their Forms presents a brilliantly eclectic collection of modern artistic imagination. His first published poem was a sonnet about another poet, Helen Maria responses to William and Dorothy Wordsworth and the wonderful manuscript Williams. At Dove Cottage the household gods were Chaucer, Milton, Chatterton and collections of the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage. Burns. Dorothy Wordsworth’s wild eyes and attentive ears quickened much of her Unlike any other English writer except Shakespeare, Wordsworth has encouraged brother’s greatest writing — and prompts to poetry came from further afield, too, from

and provoked creativity as later generations of painters and poets sought colours and friends such as Sir Humphry Davy, B. R. Haydon, Sir Walter Scott and Sir George words that might capture the elusive magic of his language. While satirists leapt to try Beaumont. The Prelude, Wordsworth’s autobiographical masterpiece, his lifelong to ridicule him, tourists were vigorously striding out in his footsteps. And as Frances endeavour, he thought of as a ‘joint labour’ with S. T. Coleridge. Blanchard’s Portraits of Wordsworth reveals, Wordsworth the man was also a subject of In exactly that communal Wordsworthian spirit, Their Colours and their Forms shows energetic artistic endeavour: portraits of him abound in oils, watercolours, sketches us Wordsworth’s poetry participating in a continuing flow of creation — stirring and statuary. and provoking fresh artistic engagements with its powerful, troubling and inspiring

Their Colours and their Forms updates this vibrant tradition by gathering together achievement. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth, what we see creative engagements with Wordsworth now — in paintings, sculptures, performance and hear in this book is William Wordsworth’s arrival in our new century as a living, art, electronic composition, creative walking and — yes! — in poetry. Wordsworth creative force — an inspiration for us all. liked to think that, among later poets and artists, some would be his ‘second selves’. Gathered in this book are a most distinguished company of them: Tim Brennan, Mike

Collier, David Harsent, Manny Ling, Carol McKay, John Strachan, Robert Strachan, Nicholas Roe Brian Thompson, Sam Wiehl and Tony Williams. (University of St Andrews, Trustee of the Wordsworth Trust) Collective and collaborative in its inspiration, Their Colours and their Forms is a project between artists who share a Wordsworthian vision. Despite perceptions of Wordsworth as a solitary figure, wandering lonely in pursuit of his ‘egotistical sublime’, to borrow John Keats’s fine phrase, community was also vital to his

|  | |  | Their Colours and their Forms: childhood, he was certain, for a poet of nature in the English Lake Artists’ Responses to Wordsworth District. In a sense of loss and poetic failure, Wordsworth picked up a notebook in which he and Dorothy had captured their impressions of some of their German travels and scribbled — urgently and quickly Carol McKay and John Strachan — upon it. These lines, which mark the foundational moment of The Prelude, are part of what is now known as ‘msjj’ (see figure 3), one Flowing through Brian Thompson’s glass sculpture ‘Frozen River’ (2012; of the great manuscript treasures of the Wordsworth Trust (they are figures 1 & 2), part of the Wordsworth Trust’s permanent art collection, discussed in detail in John Strachan’s biographical essay on p.80). are the first lines of the first version of William Wordsworth’s great It was that day in chilly Goslar which began the long process of the autobiographical poem The Prelude (1799; 1804; 1805; 1850). The words composition of Wordsworth’s posthumously-published masterpiece, the run through the glass like fish through a river: ‘Poem to Coleridge’ which the poet’s widow Mary published in 1850 as The Prelude. And that moment continues to prompt artistic innovation Was it for this in the twenty-first century. It is certainly evident in Thompson’s work, That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved which, like all of the exhibits in Their Colours and their Forms, sees the To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song, writings of Wordsworth — and also those of his great sister Dorothy Figure 1 And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, Brian Thompson — as germinal. Wordsworth, in our day as in his, retains the power to Frozen River 2012 And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice Float Glass inspire, to provoke and to stimulate. This exhibition is tribute to the 25.5 x 33 x 14 cms That flowed along my dreams? poet’s capacity to inspire creative thought and creative practice in a Figure 3 range of artistic forms, whether paintings, sculptures, performance art, Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), i. 1–6 ‘Was it for this’ (1798), from MSJJ (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) electronic composition, creative walking and, indeed, in verse. Let us return to Brian Thompson’s ‘Frozen River’ to reflect further Thompson’s work, inspired by John Strachan’s biographical essay on the varied modes of walking that inform this and other examples of included here, captures the moment in Goslar in the winter of 1798 — his practice. Walking, as we will see, is an important connecting thread, a moment near the heart of British Romanticism — in which the poet a path leading back from the artists and writers in this exhibition to Figure 2 appears convinced of his own artistic failure in his mission of writing Brian Thompson Wordsworth and his sister. We want to consider the creative echo of the Frozen River (top view) the great philosophical poem The Recluse, a work which S. T. Coleridge 2012 poet’s footsteps, together with the murmuring of artistic and literary Float Glass was sure it was his destiny to write. Wordsworth chided himself for his 25.5 x 33 x 14 cms voices that accompanied him and others on their varied creative journeys. lack of progress. How had it come to this? He, someone who thought Walking requires embodied action. It can also evoke a cacophony of himself at Cambridge as a ‘bard elect’, someone who had the best

|  | |  | of imaginative responses. For many of the artists and writers in this points formed the inspiration for earlier sculptures by Thompson. exhibition, walking is both inspiration and subject matter for the work In a remote site amidst the woods and hills of Solsberry, Indiana, they make. Yet, as many of the works here suggest, walking can also his iron-cast sculptures in the ‘Underground Railroads’ series (see be a creative activity in its own right: as we walk by ourselves and with figure 4) are physical reinstatements, formal remembrances of these others, noting, observing, chatting, thinking or simply day-dreaming. Just precarious transit routes. Traces in the world and of particular spaces, wandering lonely, to borrow a phrase. Sometimes we record our journeys they simultaneously chart a topographical imaginary whilst revealing as we move through space, from location to location, with cameras, something of its history. They are souvenirs too of so many lives in videos or notebooks to hand. Folded maps and electronic navigating motion, asking us to imagine how we come to know and how we

systems now allow us to get lost but also to find ourselves again. All of navigate our way through our lives. Figure 4 Brian Thompson this and more can become the very material of creative practice. Thompson’s work is characterized by its specific approach to form Underground Railroads 1, 2 & 3 2010 The paths and maps of walks — both his own and those made and considered use of materials. The cast-iron of the ‘Underground Wood and Paper 1: 5.5 x 2.5 x 1.5 cms by others — are recurring themes in Brian Thompson’s work. He is Railroads’ series, for instance, in its solidity and weight contrasts the 2: 4.7 x 4.5 x 2.0 cms 3: 9.4 x 7.5 x 2.0 cms continuously fascinated by the physical journeys we make in and translucent glass layers of ‘Frozen River.’ Where the sited and grounded through places, and how these are mapped, recorded and valued. substantiality of the former dares us never to forget, the latter invites So ‘Frozen River’ (see figures 1 & 2) is literally shaped by and from us to see ourselves reflected in the depths of Wordsworth’s words. topographical records, its layers traced from maps of the Derwent and Glass here of course is also a visual metaphor for the frozen surfaces Goslar in Germany, places where Wordsworth walked and that inspired of Goslar, which trapped William and Dorothy during that long bitter some of his greatest writing, places that are geographically distant yet winter of 1798: housebound, immobile, writing and remembering. connected visually here in Thompson’s sculpture and through the act of In making a series of walks in and around the Lake District, which poetic reflection that is Wordsworth’s Prelude. literally shape and add form to many of his works in the exhibition, Walking, of course, is a means by which we can explore places, Thompson is consciously emulating the walking patterns of William man-made or otherwise. Paths get worn, compress and build up over and Dorothy. Both were vigorous walkers whenever they could, often generations, leaving a physical trace on the surface. Some paths are together, sometimes with others, sometimes alone. Their walk from illicit — shortcuts by which generations of walkers make places their Wensleydale across the Pennines to their new home in Grasmere in own. Other paths are deliberately hidden or secret, as in the safe routes the last days of 1799 has almost mythic status: the walk of brother and to freedom so important to those endeavouring to escape the shackles sister in the midst of yet another bitter midwinter both a homemaking of slavery in nineteenth-century North America. This underground and a homecoming. They had walked some of their now-familiar railroad of secret routes, safe houses and secretly coded meeting routes some six years earlier, on a tour described by Dorothy in one

|  | |  | of her letters: ‘I walked with my brother at my side, from Kendal to earth pigments evokes different historical cartographies and exchanges. Grasmere, eighteen miles, and afterwards from Grasmere to Keswick, Burnt and raw sienna pigment over native English oak becomes a fifteen miles, through the most delightful country that ever was seen.’ material metaphor for all that walking to and fro between here and Dorothy’s matter-of-fact description of the distances seems even more there, near and far, of the Romantics, their walking predecessors extraordinary when we consider the conditions of her walking — no and their peripatetic successors. Thompson’s digital prints offer an specialist shoes or protective clothing, no gps, no mobile phone in alternative visualization of his creative walking process. Again, they case of emergency. Coming to the end of his own epic walking of the are coded memories or traces of well-trodden routes. Lines traced here Pennine Way in 2010, poet Simon Armitage recalls glancing round at are layered over abstracted, pixilated maps (see figure 9), evoking a Figure 7 Brian Thompson his fellow walkers, to see his mother pulling a black recyclable bin bag contemporary digital cartography, and yet also bringing to mind the Skiddaw from West to East 2012 Ash 16.4 x 15.8 x 6.0 cms over her head as protection from a sudden downpour. One wonders much-cited words of twentieth-century painter Paul Klee, for whom what Dorothy might have done in similar circumstances. ‘drawing is taking a line for a walk’. Figure 5 Brian Thompson Like a number of the artists here, Thompson embraces new As already suggested, then, Dorothy and William Wordsworth are Lake Windermere to the Viewing Station 2012 technologies of making and walking. He deliberately records some of key figures in any account of the relation between creative practice Painted Oak (burnt sienna) 16.5 x 8.7 x 3.7 cms his re-walks with modern satellite navigation. Tracking his movement and walking today, just as their place, their Lake District, continues to through space, the lines inscribed by the technology become the first inspire countless numbers of walkers to follow in their footsteps. For notation, the outline drawing, for the sculptures he subsequently many of the artists and writers themselves — as for the Wordsworths fabricates using technically sophisticated water-jet cutters. Through the — there is much creative excitement around the humble act of going for layering of such processes, Thompson approximates the footsteps of a walk, as well as many challenges in terms of how we understand its the Wordsworths, all the time aware of other fellow travellers: Gilpin, potential. Turner and the many others who navigated similar paths in search In the opening lines of ‘The Two Thieves; or, the Last Stage of of the picturesque, the best view. ‘Lake Windermere to the Viewing Avarice’ (1800), Wordsworth himself evokes the work of another great Figure 8 Brian Thompson Station’ (see figure 5) is a three-dimensional record of one such well- artist-walker: Easedale Tarn to Goody Bridge 2012 Painted Oak (burnt sienna) trodden path, as is ‘To Rydal Grotto’ (see figure 6). The materials 21.4 x 14.0 x 7.0 cms of Thompson’s sculptures are once more complexly significant. O now that the genius of Bewick were mine, Constructed from indigenous species – plum, elm, wisteria, chestnut And the skill which he learned on the banks of the Tyne, — they acknowledge the detailed observations of place so important to Then the Muses might deal with me just as they chose, the Wordsworths. There is an unplanned contemporary poignancy in For I’d take my last leave both of verse and of prose. Figure 6 Brian Thompson ‘Skiddaw from West to East’ (see figure 7), one of his mountain series, To Rydal Grotto 2012 Fruit Wood (plum) which is fabricated from ash; in other instances such as ‘Easedale Tarn What feats would I work with my magical hand! 15.6 x 7.6 x 3.4 cms to Goody Bridge’ (see figure 8), overlaying native materials with Italian Book-learning and books should be banished the land. Figure 9 Brian Thompson Helvellyn by Striding Edge 2012 Digital Print 40 x 30 cms

|  | |  | The Bewick he refers to is of course the great wood-engraver and walking practice had been partially eclipsed by that of the younger illustrator Thomas Bewick: yet another formidable pedestrian for Romantic artists; by Wordsworth, for instance, as in 1790 with fellow whom ‘being there’, moving in an through place, was central to and student Robert Jones he walked away after his University of Cambridge engagement with an understanding of nature. In 1776, at the age of 23, exams, through France into the Alps and Switzerland. Where Bewick between completing his apprenticeship to the engraver and book-maker covered many of his miles out of necessity, from Cherryburn to work Ralph Beilby and settling down to establish his own family business, in Newcastle, a regular walking commute, Wordsworth made walking Bewick embarked on a mammoth 500-mile walk from Newcastle to the central to his life and art. Where, for Bewick, walking was a means to an Highlands of Scotland. He described the motivations for this period end or an interlude of escape from daily responsibilities, for Wordsworth in his life in terms that resonate still, as numerous artists and writers it was the very act and form of culture. As Rebecca Solnit argues in continue to walk as a mode of creative exploration and technique of Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001), for Wordsworth ‘walking was a imaginative liberation: mode not of travelling but of being’, and it is to Wordsworth that we often look in compiling a genealogy of artistic walking practices. We

Having all my life, at home, at school and during my associate him of course with walking (and talking) in the landscape, apprenticeship lived under perpetual restraints — when I thus sometimes on his own, often with companions, friends and family; felt myself at liberty, I became as I suppose, like a bird which but he also for many years walked up and down his garden terrace in had escaped from its cage. Rydal, the physicality — and domesticity — of the action part of his creative process. Many of his poems seem to have been composed whilst A Memoir of Thomas Bewick, Written by Himself (1862) walking, or as drafts, read aloud with walking companions. Walking becomes a poetic device and formal structure. Walks and walkers are This liberating interlude of sustained walking is described at length the subject, often in the early poems denoting political sympathies, in the memoir he began drafting in 1822, six years before his death. for peasants and pedlars, vagrants, displaced and political wanderers. His self-identification with other walkers, other people of the streets, And some of his walking, notably in France at a time of Revolutionary appears throughout the memoir and is at one with his identity as upheavals, was both the political gesture of an ardent young man and an artist, best known as he is as a practitioner of the ‘plain man’s the beginnings of a sustained creative journey. art’, a printer from wood-blocks who provided a new and accessible Acknowledging the contemporary social construction and visualization of nature and the details of natural history though the political significance of walking, artist Tim Brennan has developed an many books he illustrated. experimental creative methodology that he refers to as manoeuvres. All By the time he embarked on his memoirs however, Bewick’s of his manoeuvres in some way reconfigure the organized guided walk,

|  | |  | either as shared performance or associated manifestation in the form of methodology. For Brennan, though, the wonder of any situation guide-books and, more recently, downloadable apps for smart phones. derives not from its role within a natural order, but from its location His manoeuvres tend to be place-specific; some are localized while others within language and culture, within discourse. His use of discursive are durational and long-distance. His Crusade (2004) (see figure10 ), quotations — as ready-mades and found materials — may indeed be at for instance, followed the route of the Jarrow marchers, a twenty-five odds with Wordsworth’s Romantic aesthetics. Yet, underneath, there is day walk from South Tyneside to the House of Commons, whilst his a compelling similarity in difference, in the subjectivity and imaginary more recent Vedute Manoeuvre at the 2011 Venice Biennale (see figure 11), force of both artists’ response to place. More, through his walking Figure 12 traced a circumscribed route around St. Mark’s Square, using specific itineraries, Brennan continually draws attention to the quotidian and Tim Brennan Ashbrooke Clearing paintings by the artist Canaletto as route markers. In many of his everyday: it is not the special or the noteworthy that makes for the Lightjet print 2006 112.5 cms x 150 cms walks Brennan walks with others, performing the role of guide, and in experience, but anything and everything, depending on how we look at one sense embodying a very recognizable presence as he acts out the it. The weather and the corner shop, the people we meet along the way, Figure 10 functionality of countless other such figures in diverse contexts. But as the shoes or boots on our feet: in this attentiveness to the ordinary we Tim Brennan Codex: Crusade guide he is also a far more imaginary and porous figure, one who finds can again trace a path back to Wordsworth. 2004 (Publisher: Art Editions North) his place in the world by ventriloquizing the words, observations and Brennan has spoken of his long-standing fascination for the actions of others who may once have been there. Leading a group of Wordsworthian sublime. In his earlier project The NORTH, for participants along a set route, he pauses at preselected stopping points, instance, he explored the visual aesthetics of Romanticism in a series which he then seeks to activate through a web of quotations, invoking of images and objects that deliberately juxtaposed lo-fi technologies a cacophony of voices that variously describe, remark on or otherwise (low resolution phone cameras) with a quasi-abstract language of narrate stories of specific locations and the places they in turn connect colour and form (see figures 12 & 13). He is drawn to the experience of to. In vocalizing such accounts anew while walking with others, self-transcendence that for many lies at the core of the sublime, and Brennan’s manoeuvres seek to provoke still more conversations, shared this has become a central preoccupation in his most recent practice. murmurings that may be insightful or political, flirtatious or humorous, Duration and endurance are twin aspects of his approach, as in his Figure 13 Tim Brennan and probably all at once. extraordinary Roman Runner Manoeuvre in which he undertakes to run Ancient Wood Lightjet print 2006 Talking, indeed, is as important as walking in many of Brennan’s the boundaries of the Roman Empire (he has recently competed the 112.5 cms x 150 cms manoeuvres. By invoking various voices he seeks to generate multi- northernmost limits, along both Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Figure 11 layered accounts of places, of multiple pasts and present identities. Wall). In this he embraces the potential dissolution of the self in the Tim Brennan Verdute Manoeuvre This sense of the complexity of place has echoes of Wordsworth, as sheer immensity and immediacy of the experience, whilst invoking 2011 Information as material does Brennan’s continual embrace of the walking tour as creative possibilities for return and renewal, as mediated through the various

‘The Knowledge’ exhibition, 54th Venice Biennale, Gervesuti Foundation, 2011 (Photo Emma Stark, 2011)

|  | |  | artistic traces or ‘by-products’ of his practice which are transmitted coherence, whilst struggling with the technology and the kit. to others using both traditional and digital media. The videos he ‘Their Colours and their Forms’, the title for this exhibition, posts on YouTube, for instance, neatly convey a sense of his subjective borrows, of course, from Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles immersion in the process, tempered by sociability and more everyday above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a madness (we see him mending his running shoes with patches from an Tour, July 13, 1798’. Recollecting an earlier visit to the same location, old orange cagoule in his university office). the poem evokes an animal-like responsiveness to the sensory pleasures ‘iAmbic Pedometer: Ur Manoeuvre’, the title of his video of being in nature, a mode of being in place that takes us before and installation in this exhibition is characteristic of Brennan’s invention beyond walking: with words. His neologism references the unrhymed iambic pentameter or blank verse, one of the most common metrical rhythms in English when like a roe poetry. As a great exponent of the form, Wordsworth exploited its I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides seemingly natural and conversational rhythms in much of his work. Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

‘iAmbic Pedometer: Ur Manoeuvre’ is unedited hand-held video Wherever nature led. footage of a walk Brennan made through Sunderland, the duration of the walk in this case dictated by the battery life in his iPhone (see Part of the poem is addressed to the poet’s ‘dearest Friend’, ‘my figure 14). Wordsworth never visited Wearside as far as we know, dear, dear Sister’ Dorothy, who accompanies him and in whom he but Sunderland is Brennan’s home: he was born there and now apprehends: works and lives there again. Like Wordsworth, his creative practice continually returns to a central hub. At the time of preparing this My former pleasures in the shooting lights Figure 14 essay for print, Brennan’s walk was still imaginary, a future-tense Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while Tim Brennan iAmbic Pedometer: Ur Manoeuvre prospect open to accident, encounter and insult. So — perhaps — we May I behold in thee what I was once. January 2013 Performance and video using an see him leaving home once again to manoeuvre his way through his Apple iPhone 3G Duration: 1:37:52 urban surroundings, moving more slowly this time, as he walks and Continuous companion to her brother, Dorothy’s spontaneous talks, mumbling incessantly to himself as he goes. In the very process apprehension of the detail of nature encountered through walking was of walking, the familiarity of place becomes unfamiliar, a stage for described in many of her journals. None were published during her creative performance. Only occasionally do his murmurs become more lifetime, but nevertheless they were a lifetime’s work, at least until cogent, passages of comparative lucidity that give us some clue to his she was struck down by debilitating illness. For her brother, as for ventriloquizing Wordsworth’s words from The Prelude. Or perhaps he is many others of the time and later, Dorothy’s creative sensibility, and more an urban shamanic poet, speaking in tongues on the edge of (in) the language of natural description through which it is articulated, is

|  | |  | imagined in specific terms, as both woman-like and child-like, natural describes her feelings on the morning of her brother’s wedding (see and intuitive, as when the older brother–poet catches in her innocent figures 16 & 17). This is a famous and much-discussed journal entry voice ‘the language of my former heart’. — one which is also the focus of a new poem for this exhibition and Mike Collier’s recent paintings and prints respond to this complex publication by the poet David Harsent (see p.51). Dorothy’s famous myth of Dorothy, as sister, walker, writer, observer. More specifically, lines are reproduced in her own script within the coloured squares of he takes inspiration from her journals held in the collections of the Collier’s print: ‘lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing anything’. Wordsworth Trust. In creatively reworking pages from the journals What was she thinking?, Collier seems to be asking. Two sentences on he draws our attention to the materiality of both writing and walking this page of the original manuscript have been heavily crossed out. We and to the specificity of her observations. Dorothy’s handwritten and are not sure who crossed them out, or why, or what the deleted words precisely dated pages are repurposed by the artist, in a process that actually say. Collier leaves the erasures intact, instead inviting the combines new digital formats with traditional painterly experiment. viewer to imagine what lies beneath. Collier fabricates new senses from words first inscribed by Dorothy, Fascinatingly fragile objects, Dorothy’s manuscripts bear the

for instance, from notes made from a walk on 15 April 1802, in which physical imprint of their maker, the handwriting both expressive and Figure 16 she first describes the array of splendid daffodils that so famously opaque, strange to contemporary eyes more used to words and letters From Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry dated Tuesday 26th July (actually reappeared five years later in the first publication of her brother’s poem on a screen or on a printed page. Yet, as Collier’s work demonstrates, the 27th) covering the period from then until 8th October 1802 commonly known by the same name. Collier extracts and elaborates words and their individual letters can resonate with meaning peculiar (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) specific words and phrases: Gowbarrow, Misty Morning, Daffodils. Each to themselves. In other prints and original artworks here, he colours Figure 15 letter of each word is embodied anew in his print as echoing layers of directly over scanned text from Dorothy’s journal, in a kind of double Mike Collier Gowbarrow, Misty Morning, form and colour, in turn juxtaposed with printed text that serves also erasure that simultaneously masks and draws attention to her words, to Daffodils 2012 (From Dorothy Wordsworth’s as the title, the wind seized our breath (see figure 15). Meaning literally her characteristically fresh powers of natural description (see figures 20 journal entry, 15 April 1802) Digital Print 25 x 12 cms stretches beyond the words in the small but elongated vertical format & 21, on p.27). Such language is a constant fascination for the artist and (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) of the print that in turn evokes the unfurled scrolls of Japanese Haiku. such words literally add shape to the form of his larger-scale paintings Materials, meaning and process are interlinked here, as in all of and prints. The familiar unfamiliarity of vernacular names, dialects Collier’s work. In this case, the relevant pages from Dorothy’s journal of birds and plants once known but fleetingly remembered, are often are digitally scanned so that isolated letters can be transferred onto incorporated into abstract visual architectures that in turn hint back to square blocks of colour fabricated from locally sourced pastels. the specificity of places and their ecological frameworks. The same technique is used in Collier’s print The Ring which refers In all of his work, Collier explores the relationship between writing, to the page from Dorothy’s journal of 4 October 1802 in which she artwork and the phenomenological apprehension of localities, as

Figure 17 Mike Collier The Ring 2012 Digital Print 30 x 18 cms (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust)

|  | |  | experienced primarily through the embodied practice of walking. He car park; exploring the flora clinging to the surviving brickwork traces is another formidable artist-walker and walking in the company of of Sunderland’s once-dominant industries; marvelling at the bird-life others is a key part of his work. In a contemporary sense these journeys on the Wear’s marshland. And listening of course to those sounds of begin to reinvigorate the art of natural observation so important to wildness normally obscured by the clamour of the city. For some, Bewick and the Wordsworths. Collier curates walks that are inherently there may be a renewed astonishment in the process, a shift in our sociable, their meandering format inviting conversation and the sharing usual patterns of city occupancy, and growing awareness of our Figure 18 of knowledge even (or perhaps especially) among strangers. As process, tendency to overlook. Mike Collier Street Flowers: Urban Survivors of the the walking is ephemeral. It is repeatable, but never replicable, the The large-scale print titled The Ancient Brotherhood of Mountains: Privileged Land. A curated walk for the AV Festival in 2012 vagaries of weather and seasonal patterns ensuring this. For some, there was a loud uproar in the hills included here is characteristic in its Walking away from the National Glass the walking is enough in itself. Their engagement in the process responsiveness both to place and to culture (see figure 19). Collier, like Centre, 7.45am on the 25th March 2012 (Photography: Daniel Magill) ends with the cup of tea at the end of the walk. Others may use the Wordsworth, has walked the mountains of the Lake District many experience as springboard or inspiration for other creative experiments, times. As so many others have done before and since, he has found Figure 20 Mike Collier photographic or otherwise. The shared experience, for Collier, generates himself standing on their summits, looking, pointing and naming the Good Friday 1 2012 new knowledge of species and plant-life encountered during the walk. others that stretch out around, seemingly boundless yet enclosing. The (From Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry, Friday 16th April 1802) This ‘botanizing’ combines with the diverse individual perceptions title is borrowed from Wordsworth’s poem ‘To Joanna’, evoking the Digital Print 15 x 10 cms (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) and social observations that inevitably emerge as the conversations poet’s own similar act of poetic recognition, his naming that is also develop and the walk unfolds in its place-specific way. All of this serves an echoing, a voicing back from the tors themselves. But the words in as material for thought, to be layered intuitively into the fabric of the Collier’s print take us back even further, to the oldest derivations of abstract paintings and drawings he constructs back in the studio. these same mountain names; in turn these words become encircling Many of Collier’s curated walks are also collaborations, slow — forms, literally embedded in the natural pigments that surround them. moving explorations of urban ‘edgelands’, those in between, marginal The next of our artists, and the first creative writer, is the and often unsung places where rural and urban coincide, where distinguished poet David Harsent, winner of the Forward Prize and, for Figure 19 Mike Collier ‘wildness’ survives or infiltrates. Led by Collier and naturalist Keith his most recent collection, Night (2011), the Griffin International Poetry The Ancient Brotherhood of Mountains: there was a loud uproar in the hills 2012 Bowey, his recent ‘Street Flowers: Urban Survivors’ took a group of Prize (see figure 22). Harsent’s powerful poem ‘Effaced’ (see p.51) (From To Joanna, Poems on the Naming of Places) Digital Print 120 x 120 cms fifteen on a walking, talking, pausing, listening exploration of the included here is again primarily concerned with Dorothy Wordsworth (produced in collaboration with Emma Tominey) Wear’s riverside (see figure 18). At various moments on the four-hour and with one of the most mysterious episodes in her life and her love walk, participants found themselves considering the signs of spring for her brother. Harsent’s poem describes a Dorothy ‘widowed without underfoot on a much-trampled path, beside an overspill University being wed’, and his epigraph refers to one of the key manuscripts in

Figure 21 Mike Collier Good Friday 2 2012 (From Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry, Friday 16th April 1802) Digital Print 15 x 10 cms (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust)

|  | |  | the Trust’s collection, one which does not yield up all of its secrets have visited the small bedroom in Dove Cottage will remember, hung even to this day: ‘On the night before her brother’s wedding, Dorothy as it is with pages from The Times. The Wordsworth Trust’s Museum Wordsworth went to bed wearing the ring with which William would and the Jerwood Centre nearby also offer constant reminders of the marry Mary Hutchinson. An account of this in her journal was later visual power of the words of the Wordsworth, displaying, protecting, heavily deleted’. The very mystery of this manuscript exerts a powerful celebrating the manuscript as much as the printed page. imaginative force for Harsent as for a number of the artists here. Manny Ling’s experimental calligraphy, examples of which are also Such evocative manuscripts, indeed, lay behind the curatorial included here (see figure 23), are fine examples of such visual utterance, thinking for the present exhibition as a whole, exploring as it does the such words on the wall as well as on the page. The repurposing and relationship between words and things and the imaginative resonances reinterpretation of existing texts is central to all the great calligraphic of artistic materials: of forms, colours, sounds and performance. The traditions and, in his own practice, Ling embraces Eastern and Western

Figure 22 poet Seamus Heaney, like Harsent, is published by Faber & Faber and elements in a deliberately intuitive manner. His methodology is an David Harsent Night 2011 the manuscript of Heaney’s tribute poem ‘Wordsworth’s Skates’ (2006) embodied and gestural one. It is also performative, as in recent works was inspired by a visit to the Wordsworth Museum where the author where he draws with molten glass on paper (see figure 24). Here, the

saw the pair of skates which the poet used on skating expeditions scorched and burned marks on the paper become a material history, Figure 23 Manny Ling from Rydal Mount (see figure 31 on p.35). Heaney’s poem, which was over which his calligraphic pen marks are later inscribed. Other works Extract from ‘Derwent’ by John Strachan (ll.3–4) 2013 Chinese Xuan paper, Sumi ink, Chinese published in his collection District and Circle (2006), imagines the boys embrace old and new technologies, exploring the calligraphic — and brushes, metal leaves, Manuscript Chronicle nibs 36 x 23 cms of Hawkshead Grammar School skating on a winter’s day: gestural — dimensions of digital processes. Ling visualizes the poetry of Wordsworth anew in works for this the reel of them on frozen Windermere exhibition. The quintessential English poet is refigured here through As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its curve East Asian materials and calligraphic perspectives as Chinese paper and And left it scored. inks are combined with a distinctly gestural process, one that embraces spontaneity, chance and accident (see pp.54–59). Yet, at the same Such pairing of poem and object inspired the curators of this exhibition time, and surprisingly perhaps, this complex material dialogue is also to believe that poetry on Wordsworthian themes might indeed be indebted to contemporary Photoshop techniques. In giving form to the hung on the walls of the Trust’s Museum and Gallery, as well as being words of other writers and poets included here, Ling’s work sparks an published in book form. echoing of many voices. These resonant echoes remind us again of the Figure 24 The material of words, words on the walls: the Wordsworths materiality of writing, and the ability of its forms to take us — viewers, Manny Ling ‘Life is the thing we all want’ 2012 themselves sometimes lived around and with them, as those who readers and makers alike — to an experience of meaning that is, in Words by Edward Johnston Pyrographic calligraphy many ways, beyond words. 40 x 40 cms

|  | |  | Where Ling’s images give new shape to the poet’s words, inviting Such textual descriptions of the soundings of man and nature, from us to immerse ourselves us in their forms and colours, the audio- Book i of Wordsworth’s Two-Part Prelude, have been isolated here so visual work of Robert Strachan and Sam Wiehl offers an echoing, as to form the underlying poetic score for Undistinguishable Motion, sonorous response. The affective power of sound has been a key motif Strachan and Wiehl’s newly-completed surround sound audio-visual in Strachan and Wiehl’s collaborative practice with Liverpool’s Hive installation (see pp.64–69). Found sounds and digital technologies are Collective over the past half-decade. On the one hand, this work has so layered that the listener may find unexpectedly familiar encounters been much concerned with connections between sound, emotion and within the mesh of reverberating noise. A series of echoes surrounds landscape (both rural and urban). On the other, it has also explored us, gradually building in intensity and shape to varying levels of intel- the implications of ubiquitous digital technologies upon individual and ligibility. Some end up in clearly recognisable or musical shapes, while collective memory (see figures 25–28). others are of more indeterminate origin, at times unsettling or uncanny As Strachan and Wiehl remind us, Wordsworth’s poetic landscapes whilst others are more nostalgic and poignant.

Figure 25 encapsulate the fundamental sensory power of sound. They are aloud John Strachan’s poem ‘Derwent’ (see p.63) is another response to Robert Strachan and Bob Wass (The Hive Collective) 2011 with textual noises and uncanny reverberation, animate echoes of the opening lines of the first book of the 1799 Prelude, the work which Figure 27 ‘ReLive’ sound/video installation The Hive Collective 2012 FACT (Foundation for Art and nature, of humans and animals, interspersed with moments of silent has been the most influential in the current exhibition. In this case the ‘Unsettle’ sound/video installation Creative Technology) Liverpool Biennial 2012 Tate Liverpool 2011 poignancy. In such a way, his poetic voice speaks to us from before this remarkable portrait of the boy Wordsworth playing — if that is not too digital age, before even the age of recorded sound, murmuring back to weak a word for his vigorous, symbolically-charged boyish pastimes — us again. at the side of the Derwent in Cockermouth is inspiration:

I heard … solitary hills Was it for this that I, a four year’s child, Low breathings … sounds A naked Boy, among thy silent pools Of undistinguishable motion, steps Made one long bathing of a summer’s day? Almost as silent as the turf they trod Basked in the sun, or plunged into thy streams,

Alternate, all a summer’s day, or coursed Figure 26 Figure 28 The Hive Collective 2009 strange utterance … loud dry wind Over the sandy fields, and dashed the flowers The Hive Collective 2008 ‘A Question You Have Always Want- ‘The Spectacular Suburb’ ed to Ask’ sound/video installation. … through my ears! Of yellow grunsel, or when crag and hill, sound/video installation Tate Liverpool 2009 The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), I. 30–65 Were bronzed with a deep radiance, stood alone, A naked Savage in the thunder-shower?

Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), i. 17–26

|  | |  | The final artist to contribute to the exhibition is the poet and fiction Strachan’s poem engages with the vision of the child at his play and writer Tony Williams (see figure 30), who is undertaking a project with the notion of parental absence which has sometimes been seen as funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council entitled ‘The formative in the Two-Part Prelude. Writer Walking the Dog: Creative Writing and Everyday Life’ which Wordsworth’s was a metapoetical vision; that is to say that he was researches the dual identities of walker and writer and the productive much, indeed centrally, concerned with the writing of poetry itself and relationship between the two. Williams is much concerned with both with the nature of creative activity, that ‘ennobling interchange / Of the sociocultural positioning of the walking-writer and the function action from without and from within’, as he put it in the thirteenth book of walking in day-to-day writing practice. Clearly both of these topics

of the 1850 Prelude. That poem which everybody knows, or thinks they draw heavily on the lives and practice of the Wordsworths. Indeed, to Figure 30 Tony Williams know, the ‘Daffodils’ from the Poems in Two Volumes of 1807, is typical Williams, self-knowledge as both a walker and a writer cannot help but All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head 2011 Figure 29 in its attention to the nature of poetic creation in its great image of the construct itself partly in relation to their examples. However, Williams’s John Strachan/Richard Terry Poetry flashing flowers: ‘They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of own writing practice utilises walking as a daily space for reflection, pause 2011 solitude’. Strachan’s ‘Untitled’ (see p.62), which begins ‘Words are not and composition, but differentiates it from high Romantic notions of like other creatures ...’, is prompted by Wordsworth’s poem and ends inspiration: to him, typically, the landscape he walks through every day, with a direct allusion to the Lake poet’s own igneous metaphor. Strachan paradoxically, becomes invisible, a blank space for creative thinking. is a renowned scholar of Romanticism, but his interest in the form of That said, Williams has written of the landscape which surrounds verse and the way it is constructed is also seen in Poetry (see figure 29), him on his peripatetic musings that ‘I do sometimes pay attention, written with Richard Terry (2000; 2011), a book which addresses both the though’. The poems presented here represent one way in which he has study and the writing of poetry. taken walking itself as the direct subject of his creative work. ‘The Path ‘Wordsworth at Castlerigg’ (see p.61) is a response to Wordsworth’s that Follows the Traveller’ (see p.77) imagines Wordsworth’s thought Salisbury Plain (1793–4), that remarkable and too often overlooked and life in relation to his walking. With an underlying pulse of blank poem, a work related to both prehistory and the French Revolution, verse, the immediate model for the argument and pace of the poem is with its attention to Stonehenge and ‘that powerful circle’s reddening Derek Walcott’s ‘Sea Canes’ (1976), a poem which concerns walking, stones’, to what Alan Liu once called ‘Wordsworth’s scene of violence’, though, of course, one but little related to Wordsworth. and to the Druidism of a ‘sacrificial altar fed / With living men’. With The valorization of the Lake District countryside by William and verbal echoes of Wordsworth’s narrative of Celtic Wiltshire and its Dorothy Wordsworth and others provides an opportunity for Williams druidic sacrifice, the poem imagines the stone carles — ‘men’ — of the to think about his own home landscape, Matlock in Derbyshire. The north lakes host to a similar scene. poet writes of his own poem ‘Derwent’ (p.74) that ‘the town’s river

|  | |  | shares its names with the Cumbrian Derwent, and in that poem of that modern literary studies. Since the 1970s and the recovery of the critical reputation of title I wanted to explore ideas of plurality, repetition and mortality, and the Romantic poets, Wordsworth has been interpreted in many different ways: as the in particular the strange sensation of discovering as I grew older that philosophical poet whose work fascinated the Yale School and the deconstructionists, the intense identifications I felt with very specific places were shared, as a poet of Revolution, as the great but politically reactionary poet of the New ultimately, with no one’. Historicist imagination, as the first ecological poet. And it must also not be forgotten We will also let Williams speak for himself regarding his final poem, that Wordsworth continues — as here — to prompt artistic creation in several cultural ‘The Rural Citizen’ (p.79): forms. Tony Williams’s engagement with Wordsworth is but one of the manifold artists’ responses to the poet and to his sister in this exhibition. It’s very easy for modern leisure walkers — or indeed writer-walkers — to repeat Wordsworth’s routes or writing practice, and feel they are reproducing his experiences in some degree. In

‘The Rural Citizen’ I wanted to think about the legal and cultural conditions in which we walk through landscapes, the extent to which we are allowed or demand to do so. It’s very easy to theorise the city as a difficult and dynamic modern location, and the countryside as a privileged, traditional or simple one; but the idea of the city can’t be bound in by walls, and even a herd of cows blocking a five-bar gate can be politically charged.

Wordsworth and his thought still shape the ‘cultural conditions in which we walk through landscapes’, in the activities of the Wordsworth Figure 31 Wordsworth’s Skates (see p.28) (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) Trust, now in one of the most vibrant periods of its history, in the wider work of the National Trust (founded in large part by that indefatigable Wordsworthian Canon H. D. Rawnsley), and in the very nature and geography of the Lake District National Park. In like manner, the poet continues to occupy a space near the centre of

|  | |  | THE ARTISTS TIM BRENNAN

Tim Brennan iAmbic Pedometer revolves around the report of Wordsworth’s mode of Mike Collier composition in which he would walk and utter aloud for hours on end. The work is an iPhone video of a walk made by the artist from his home David Harsent in Sunderland. Moving through inner city, suburban and open spaces, Manny Ling Brennan’s mumblings shift from semi-cogent announcement to that of the concrete poem. They collide Kurt Schwitter’s ‘ur poetry’ (another John Strachan Cumbrian resident) with that of the pentameter. The artist sees this fusion as proposing Wordsworth’s early writing mode as bearing a Robert Strachan & relation to that of the Shaman, who, once induced into a separate Sam Wiehl reality, may then speak in a variety of tongues to provide insight. Ashbrooke Tempel is a suite of four photographs that further Brian Thompson distil the above into emblematic form: the walking stick (‘Radical Tony Williams Antiquariansim’), a field of dream (‘Red Meadow’), the cloud (‘Memory’) and the church at sunset (‘Slight Return’).

•

|  | |  | TIM BRENNAN

Tim Brennan Ashbrooke Tempel: Tim Brennan Radical Antiquarianism Ashbrooke Tempel: Red Meadow |  | 2013 2013 |  | Tim Brennan Tim Brennan Ashbrooke Tempel: Memory Ashbrooke Tempel: Slight Return |  | 2013 2013 |  | MIKE COLLIER

The prints on pages 43 & 45 relate to the famous entry in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal where she describes her response to events between Tuesday 26 July (actually 27) and 8 October 1802 and in particular (on this specific page) of her feelings on the morning of her brother William’s wedding on 4 October 1802. The Ring (p.43) focuses firstly on the parts of the text we can see (Dorothy says that she ‘lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing anything’), and secondly on the text which has been erased. McKay and Strachan explain in more detail how this print was made and the questions it asks (see their essay, p.24 of this publication). The colours used in The Ring express the complex nature of this diary entry and in two other prints illustrated here, The Ring (1) and The Ring (2) (p.45), Collier has captured something of this ambiguity, this time working spontaneously and directly with pastels over a printed image of the manuscript page. The Ancient Brotherhood of Mountains: there was a loud uproar in the hills was inspired by a reading of William Wordsworth’s ‘To Joanna’ from Poems on the Naming of Places (and in particular the excerpt printed on p.46). In it, Wordsworth refers to the hills as a ‘brotherhood of ancient mountains’ and Collier’s use of Old Norse and Old English names (plus the combination of earthy and airy colours along with a tactile use of pigment) implies a perception of time, weight, rock and soil as well as a sense of air and distance, whilst the circular form of the text suggests the (imagined) echoes and sounds of these hills calling to each other.

Opposite page: Mike Collier The Ring 2012 Digital Print, 40 x 35 cms (produced in collaboration with Emma Tominey) |  | (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) |  | MIKE COLLIER

(I slept a good deal of the night) … and rose fresh and well in the morning – at a little after 8 o'clock I saw them go down the avenue towards the Church. William had parted from me upstairs.

. When they were absent my dear little Sara prepared the breakfast. I kept myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer & threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness neither hearing or seeing anything till Sara came upstairs to me & said ‘They are coming’. This forced me from the bed where I lay & I moved I knew not how straight forward … (faster than my strength could carry me)

Mike Collier The Ring (1) and The Ring (2) 2012 From Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry dated Tuesday 26th July (From Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry dated Tuesday 26th July (actually the 27th) (actually the 27th) covering the period from then until 8th October 1802 covering the period from then until 8th October 1802) |  | (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) 2 x Digital Prints 18 x 29cms |  | MIKE COLLIER

Poems on the Naming of Places

An excerpt from ‘To Joanna’

… Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud, The Rock, like something starting from a sleep, Took up the Lady’s voice, and laughed again; That ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar, And the tall Steep of Silver-how, sent forth A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard, And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone; Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky Carried the Lady’s voice, — old Skiddaw blew His speaking-trumpet; — back out of the clouds Of Glaramara southward came the voice; And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head. Derivations — Now whether (said I to our cordial Friend, Helm Cragg hjalmr: on — helmet or protection Who in the hey-day of astonishment Loughrigg hryggr on — ridge Smiled in my face) this were in simple truth Fairfield fæger: oe — fair, lovely A work accomplished by the brotherhood Helvellyn hváll: on — hill Skiddaw skúta: on — to jut Of ancient mountains, or my ear was touched Glaramara gljúfrum: pncumb (at the) ravines With dreams and visionary impulses Kirkstone kirk: OS — church mountain To me alone imparted, sure I am Silver How haugr: on (?) — silver hill That there was a loud uproar in the hills. (on = Old Norse; oe = Old English; os = Ordnance Survey And while we both were listening, to my side and pncumb is a reference to The Place Names of Cumberland The fair Joanna drew, as if she wished (ed. A. M. Armstrong; A. Mawer, F. M Stenton & Bruce To shelter from some object of her fear. Dickins. 1950–2)

Opposite page: Mike Collier The Ancient Brotherhood of Mountains: there was a loud uproar in the hills 2012 (From To Joanna, Poems on the Naming of Places) |  | Digital Print 120 x 120 cms |  | (produced in collaboration with Emma Tominey) DAVID HARSENT

‘I gave him the wedding ring …’

There’s uncertainty over whether or not it was Dorothy Wordsworth who deleted those famous (infamous) lines. In the act of writing — “That the pain starts on the feminine side pen to page — she was talking to herself, but there’s a sense in which all journals are written to be read; or, perhaps, not with the intention behind the eye.” • that they should be read, so much as the almost-welcome risk that they might be. Dorothy writes, often, as someone noting the day-to- day; but at other times talks of love so without guile or tact that her emotions betray her. When I first saw the page, I imagined the shock of recognition she must have felt when she re-read that passage after the event. ‘I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before …’ If it wasn’t Dorothy who struck out those words, she was deliberately running the risk of disclosure; but if it was her pen, heavy with ink, that scored the page, how much greater a risk she took in that dark emphasis. from ‘The Literal Body’ by Lavinia Greenlaw

|  | |  | DAVID HARSENT

On the night before her brother’s wedding, Dorothy Effaced Wordsworth went to bed wearing the ring with which A life beyond the life and known to no one, peopled by ghosts William would marry Mary Hutchinson. An account who can step up to be fleshed if you choose, or be held back, of this in her journal was later heavily deleted. can be dreamwork, can walk straight in, the invited guests you welcome and fear. You speak for them, you give them what they lack,

you note what can’t be said, you feel them out, keep track of their night-lives, night-moves, hallways, hidden rooms,

all of which delights you, moving among them, shrouded in black, widowed without being wed, feeding the fire, if you want to, with reams

of work half-done and left to grow in silence, that precious stack curling and catching — last love, last light — as you burn whatever rhymes.

|  | |  | DAVID HARSENT

“I have long loved Mary Hutchinson as a Sister, and she is equally attached to me this being so, you will guess that I look forward with perfect happiness to this Connection between us, but, happy as I am, I half dread that concentration of all tender feelings, past, present and future which will come upon me on the wedding morning. There never lived on earth a better woman than Mary H. and I have not a doubt but that she is in every respect formed to make an excellent wife to my Brother, and I seem to myself to have scarcely any thing left to wish for but that the wedding was over, and we had reached our home once again.”

Extract from a letter by Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Marshall 29 September 1802, written prior to William Wordsworth’s marriage to Mary (Courtesy of the Wordsworh Trust)

|  | |  | w

MANNY LING

Instead of starting with Wordsworth’s poetry, Manny Ling began with John Strachan’s ‘Untitled’ (see p.62) — an insightful poem about both the simple and the complex nature of letters and words. As a calligrapher, he was intrigued by Strachan’s description — “words are not like other creatures: they have demarcations unique to themselves”. These lines inspired Ling to develop a unique calligraphic script especially for this exhibition (see p.55 opposite). Ling then wanted to draw parallels and explore connections between Wordsworth’s and Strachan’s poetry and his own approaches to calligraphy (see pp.56 & 59). He suggests that both poets share similar Oriental perspectives to the landscape as he himself does. Their words have a cinematic quality and a sensibility that transports him into their landscapes from within looking out, rather than from the outside looking in. This realization has enabled Ling to create a body of work that uses a mix of Chinese and Western approaches, materials and tools. Ling believes that a poet transcribes his inner being through words and, as a calligrapher, he tries to transcribe the poet’s words into life. In this body of work, he wants the viewer to look beyond the calligraphy — to read the words transcribed — and he hopes that through this process, these letters and words will live on.

Manny Ling ‘Untitled’ by John Strachan 2013 22.5 x 34.5 cms |  | Calligraphy, Sumi ink and Manuscript Chronicle nibs |  | MANNY LING

Manny Ling Extract from ‘Derwent’ by John Strachan (ll. 3–6) 2013 31 x 66 cms |  | Calligraphy, Chinese Xuan paper, Sumi ink, Chinese brushes and Manuscript Chronicle nibs |  | MANNY LING

Manny Ling ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a |  | Tour’. (ll. 77–81) by William Wordsworth 2013 31 x 62 cms |  | Calligraphy, Chinese Xuan paper, Sumi ink, Chinese brushes and Manuscript Chronicle nibs (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) JOHN STRACHAN

John Strachan’s poem ‘Derwent’ offers another response to the opening Castlerigg Stone Circle (Courtesy of freefoto.com) of the first book of the 1799 Prelude, engaging with Wordsworth’s vision of himself as a child at Cockermouth — ‘A naked Savage in the thunder- shower’. ‘Wordsworth at Castlerigg’ is a response to Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain (1793–4), that remarkable and too often overlooked poem. With verbal echoes of Wordsworth’s narrative of Celtic Wordsworth at Castlerigg Wiltshire and its druidic sacrifice, the poem imagines the stone carles — ‘men’ — of the North Lakes host to a similar scene. Wordsworth was much concerned with the writing of poetry itself The carles loose-looped in pagan austerity, They seem no idle scattering to him. and with the nature of creative activity. The famous ‘Daffodils’ from The men, white-robed, long gone, the Poems in Two Volumes (1807) is typical in its attention to the nature But the high one’s long-rotted mouth, of poetic creation in its great image of the flowers which ‘flash upon Its voice eloquent of death and life that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude’. Strachan’s ‘Untitled’ is Still opens in that edgeway shape. This is the oldest of songs, new-made, prompted by Wordsworth’s poem and directly alludes to it. Free of manufacture’s taint, slow, deliberate.

The poet lies, on the cold heath-grass, The night-fire mounting to the clouds. He sees the living men, the sacrificial altar, Bloodied arms and dead-trailed flesh. And here the secrets known only To these hills are turned upon him And here the nature of the day Revealed, the desert and the dismal red.

|  | |  | JOHN STRACHAN

Derwent

the skulking whitethroats push deeper into the nettles Untitled but his switch is cast by.

the scent of moth-raped gillyflowers in the air words are not like other creatures: by the crooked river’s edge. they have demarcations unique to themselves. they have dark the grey pebble-stones on the margin carnalities of their own, flash, as if they long for life. inscapes of beauty, eyed inward. the rod - his scarce-word father’s - trails, safe-stabbed in earth.

past his savage-naked feet, a group of fish, hot-eyed, silver-sided, dart

fleeing from the stone loach, dark patriarch uprisen, fear-fostering.

co-extensive with them all, the river’s shadow hidden in his eyes,

he plunges, arm-cleaved through skin-surface, and spreads, and sinks, and rises.

a ‘draggled nosegay, bright-wound for his mother, left at the water’s side.

|  | |  | ROBERT STRACHAN & SAM WIEHL The voice Of mountain echoes …

Undistinguishable Motion Silent lake Robert Strachan, Sam Wiehl (Hive Collective) Silent water Grandeur in the beating of the heart Wordsworth’s is an attuned ear. His poetic voice is alive to the nuances of sound. His landscapes are sonically reverberant, aloud with noises. All shod with steel, Mountains sound, the forces of nature provide uncanny reverberations. We hissed along the polished ice … Distinctions between real and imagined noises are confused. Animal … the resounding horn cries, of uncertain origin, take on a supernatural, phantasmagorical … loud chiming and the hounded hare quality. The intrusive din of humans fills the soundscape, punctuated … with the din by moments of silent poignancy. Sonic echoes provoke psychological recollections; reflections on a life lived, redolent with emotion. Smitten, the precipices rang aloud; Undistinguishable Motion isolates Wordsworth’s descriptions of The leafless trees and every icy crag sound in Book 1 of The Prelude and employs them as a poetic score, Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills the inspiration for a new sonic departure. Drawing from the textual Into the tumult sent an alien sound descriptions of the soundings of man and nature, the installation Of melancholy not unnoticed. explores intersections between memory, sound and the physical environment to create a resonant landscape. Using found sounds and … from the uproar I retired digital technologies, it challenges the listener to discern the familiar Into a silent bay. within the redoubled layers of reverberating noise, to listen to the Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, textual sonorities growing from and returning back to silence. Feeble and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep. I heard … solitary hills Low breathing … sounds … echoes … Of undistinguishable motion, steps Silent lake Almost as silent as the turf they trod Silent water

strange utterance … loud dry wind The frost … through my ears! Raged bitterly, with keen and silent tooth. From under Esthwaite’s splitting fields of ice … the immortal spirit grows The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, Like harmony in music; there is a dark Gave out to meadow grounds and hills, a loud Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Protracted yelling like the noise of wolves Discordant elements … Howling in troupes ...

… and silent …

|  | |  | |  | Robert Strachan & Sam Wiehl ‘Undistinguishable Motion’ 2013 sound/video installation |  | |  | Robert Strachan & Sam Wiehl ‘Undistinguishable Motion’ 2013 sound/video installation |  | BRIAN THOMPSON

Brian Thompson’s sculptures explore the landscape made famous by Wordsworth. He makes parallels in the way a sculptor, like a poet, might find inspiration in the natural world. On his walks he looks for ways of revealing and sharing something of his experience of landscape and its places through a visual artist’s language of scale, form, material and colour. He is interested in how and why paths are formed over many generations. Thompson’s walks, recorded through GPS tracking or tracings from maps and aerial photographs, become the ‘line’ of the walks and the starting point of the sculptures and prints. These ‘lines’ are cut usually by hand and often in wood, with each layer becoming the template for the succeeding layer. Through small increments of size the sculptures evolve, tapering downward from top to base, incorporating errors and corrections; marking layer upon layer, in geological fashion, the history of their making. Sometimes these become ‘patterns’ for fabrication in materials and colours directly relevant to the location or simply have ‘come to mind’ when he makes the walks. The sculptures serve as diaries, mementos and sometimes trophies. They reveal something of the topography of the world and tell us something about how we come to know and navigate.

Brian Thompson Grasmere Church to Easedale Tarn 2012 |  | Painted Oak (red oxide) 21.4 x 16.5 x 4.5 cms |  | BRIAN THOMPSON

Brian Thompson Brian Thompson Brian Thompson Brian Thompson Around Easedale Tarn 2012 Easedale Walk 2012 Grasmere Round 2012 Along Loughrigg Terrace 2012 Painted Oak (raw sienna) Charred Oak Graphite and Print on Wood Elm 21.4 x 5.0 x 4.0 cms 16.4 x 10.0 x 3.0 cms 20.0 x 19.0 x 13.2 cms 23.4 x 12.5 x 6.0 cms

|  | |  | BRIAN THOMPSON

|  | |  | Top: Brian Thompson Loughrigg Terrace 2012 Digital Print 40 x 30 cms Top: Brian Thompson By the Derwent at Cockermouth 2012 Float Glass 9.2 x 14.0 x 4.0 cms Bottom: Brian Thompson Easedale Walks 2012 Digital Print 40 x 30 cms Bottom: Brian Thompson Over the Ferry to Claife Heights 2012 Porcelain 12.5 x 12.6 x 5.2 cms TONY WILLIAMS The Path that Follows the Traveller

‘It is not my intention to be illiberal’ Walking and writing are both activities Tony Williams undertakes — Wordsworth, ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ every day. His current research project, funded by the ahrc, asks how everyday activities like dog-walking might shape the writing he The rain is proof. The rain offers baptism to those who would fulfil produces. Tony asks himself: ‘Who am I when I walk the dogs, and how their responsibilities as gardeners, as dog-walkers, is this reflected in the writing I produce? How do I use dog-walking as as students of the terms on which one man an instrument of my writing practice?’ might cross the land without salary or retinue. In answering these questions Tony Williams has been aware that Only when your felt hat melts, when you taste when he walks and writes, he is following in Wordsworth’s footsteps. salt on the face’s shore, and a thorn wind, The poems presented here represent different ways the poet has do horizons sink behind the mist engaged with walking, landscape, and Wordsworth’s legacy. ‘The Rural to take in continents. I mean cold solitude Citizen’ considers how the walker is not a neutral figure but engages taught you togetherness. And the rain grew your beans, each brown brain soaked in northwesterlies with social and political debates. ‘Derwent’ reflects on Wordsworth’s until pod parliaments of foetuses affection for the river in The Prelude and Tony Williams’s affection for began to greenly form and wait. the river of that name in his own childhood home in Derbyshire. ‘The Path that Follows the Traveller’ is a kind of elegy for Wordsworth, the In the rain you grew old. Let those who preen and pine to die immaculate archetypal poet-in-movement. mock your tiredness, your bracken beaten down by rain recanting. You turned to firesides and silk to soothe your shrivelled old been in the rain too long fingertips. To have stayed where you were was against Nature.

All travelling goes somewhere, out of the sublime view, out of the valley of light, towards the grave, towards the glass grave of fame and so much water that even the umbilical cord of your signature risks dissolution like the stone of your beloved hills. It is enough that you passed through, snapping umbellifers as you went, to show the way, leaving little lakes in the prints of your boots.

|  | |  | TONY WILLIAMS The Rural Citizen

‘You took our buses, now give us some footpaths’ – headline in the Northumberland Gazette Derwent Scorning the honey-pot mountain with car park and centre ‘the fairest of all rivers’ where local crafts are displayed and distinctive – Wordsworth, The Prelude patterns of rock that have ‘shaped the life of the valley’ are shown colour-coded, scorning the barely visible They are not one, the river in the crook hump of the wall of the Iron Age fort of my elbow and in yours. The shallows (now a khazi for sheep) and the cup and ring scars, are not, the reeds, the shawl of brilliant green I emptied the flask in the river, dropped off my rucksack weeds are not one, nor the stepping stones as shrine on the roadside, buried my boots leading submerged to the far shore. in the mud by the gate where the mud-coloured cows There is a reason rivers share their names, had thronged to be fed or to die since enclosure, but it is not that the rivers are one. Each river and set off in trainers and jeans for the commonplace hill. is its own region happening again: There was the shell of the old-fashioned telly dumped in the layby, the litter from Starbucks, upstream is the paintworks and the canoeing gates, the four hundred yards on the verge of the sixty-zone road, then the high ground of another moor. the overgrown stile to the field with the bull in, Downstream is private fishing and, beyond leading to nowhere in woods where eerily echoed the wide-smiling weir, an idle brick mill the cry of a buzzard being mobbed by black-coated crows. no longer part of the river’s argument. Easy to think of the buzzard as me, the crows This river hidden in the shadow of the cliffs, as the agents of death. Easy to shiver and think swollen by others running under stone, that my boots might rise from the earth and pursue me cannot imagine another stone and another hill. assisted by footprints in that mucilaginous mud by the gate and herds of the cattle as solid as mist on the fields Listen: and you will hear the quiet bank, at morning, as cow-breath, the ghosts of the drovers and driven the still downfall of democratic rain, discursive murmurs which a listening child coming to claim me. But truer that I was a crow, might hear as the silver progress of a stream one of the many, the buzzard the gold-coloured State because the stream is there, where the child that was conjured and breasted by money — its infinite, is playing while the adults sit and talk. intricate feathers. We pursued it, I and the ghosts It is the sound of movement watching who did not walk with me, could not, marooned the leaves that fall and fall through time. in their estates and parishes, interred in the graveyards and kitchens and pubs by immovable earth Be suspicious of what the river teaches: and the price of petrol and frailty of reasons for leaving brown water cannot be throttled or sued, the heated and taxed habitations to go and lovers can’t be blamed for why we love them. across country, and learn by the ache in their knees It is the godhead’s delta, one as many each swell of the fields that contained them, each darkened corner are one, like an edition of a newspaper where nothing but dock and the odd sprig of rape (the Angling Times!). Its headline could be found to enlighten their hearts on the topic of growth. is a gurgling message which you alone can hear. I was the lesser, the rural citizen Listen to what the stream is calling, asking. who does not understand his city which hedgerows and tied-shut gates refuse him. Lie back in the meadow. Maybe in water’s meadow We dream of the desert, for the desert’s monstrous you will drown, unable to respond. sculptures make plain a horror we hope stands with us, That will not matter. Others will hear the hosts of the dead that make of the living a host the river’s calm involuntary seething, and underwrite our demand to the sacrificial king: and they will answer the challenge you have failed. you have taken our first-born sons, you have taken They will fail it too, but that does not matter: our right to guard every hearth with a spear; there are others coming, always themselves and listening, running, now give us the ear of the scribes of the law rivers returning to the open and generous sea. |  | that asserts us, now give us, by royal command, |  | our being in the fields of wheat and the beasts. Wordsworth at Goslar, Cockermouth and In what follows, Strachan offers a biographical account of the composition of the Hawkshead: A Biographical Essay opening lines of The Prelude in the Wordsworths’ cold Lower Saxon retreat in Goslar. He also looks at the substance and subject of those lines in examining Wordsworth’s feelings about his ‘sweet birthplace’ at Cockermouth and the ‘beauteous stream’ of the John Strachan Derwent which ran beside it.

Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved i To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song, Germany, Winter 1798 And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? For this didst thou, It was cold. The coldest winter of the eighteenth century, the locals said. And the two O Derwent, traveling over the green plains of them in what seemed like the coldest apartment in all of Germany, conditions so Near my ‘sweet birthplace’, didst thou, beauteous stream, bitter, wrote Dorothy Wordsworth, that moving from the one heated room upstairs to Make ceaseless music through the night and day, elsewhere in their small flat necessitated the wearing of greatcoats. Indeed, her brother Which with its steady cadence tempering Our human waywardness, composed my thoughts William joked that his landlady in Goslar, Frau Depperman — ‘rather unfeelingly’ To more than infant softness, giving me — half-expected him ‘to be frozen to death some night’. But the poet was better able Among the fretful dwellings of mankind to care for himself, and wore a fur-lined coat and a hat fashioned from dog skin — as A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm favoured by the area’s peasantry — to brave the elements. Struggling with his spoken Which Nature breathes among the fields and groves? German, Wordsworth cared little for the local gentryfolk (some of whom thought Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), i. 1–15 that his sister was no more than his mistress), nor for the town’s vulgar tradesmen (whom he and Dorothy considered to be little more than grasping cheats). Indeed, These words, which begin the first book of the first version of Wordsworth’s his principal affection amongst the inhabitants of Goslar, he recalled, was reserved for autobiographical poem The Prelude, written in a freezing Germany in 1798, resonate a sleek kingfisher, ‘a beautiful creature that used to glance by me’ on his trips out in through our modern understanding of British Romanticism and the Wordsworthian the cold as Wordsworth circled round a pond near his residence, composing under his conceptualization of poetry. As we have seen, they also provided the inspiration for breath and muttering, as was his habit, new-formed verse to himself which he refined the first work of art discussed in this book, Brian Thompson’s ‘Frozen River’ (2012). and polished as he walked. And as we have also seen the lines are also directly echoed in the poems in this volume It was during one of these chilly Teutonic perambulations in the winter of 1798/9 by John Strachan and Tony Williams, both entitled ‘Derwent’. that Wordsworth wrote ‘A Poet’s Epitaph’, verses in which he meditated on what it

|  | |  | meant to be a poet, or at least to be a poet such as himself for whom solitude and the poor insect had no sister or devoted friend to sustain him. On the next day, by the natural world were imaginatively enlivening: pond, the fly was memorialised in the anapaestic lines ‘Written in Germany on One of the Coldest Days of the Century’:

The outward shows of sky and earth, Of hill and valley, he has viewed; His spindles sink under him, foot, leg and thigh, And impulses of deeper birth His eyesight and hearing are lost, Have come to him in solitude. Between life and death his blood freezes and thaws; And his two pretty pinions of blue dusky gauze In common things that round us lie Are glued to his sides by the frost. Some random truths he can impart, — The harvest of a quiet eye No brother, no mate has he near him — while I That broods and sleeps on his own heart. Can draw warmth from the cheek of my Love; As blest and as glad, in this desolate gloom, ‘Common things that round us lie’: these six words might be said to sum up the As if green summer grass were the floor of my room, And woodbines were hanging above. preoccupations of William Wordsworth’s mature poetic style. Himself (matters of ‘his own heart’), nature (the ‘shows of sky and earth’), his family and the small – The mixture of the macabre, mock-heroic and the tender in this is striking, and few but to him remarkable — events of everyday life; these things echo throughout his previous English poets would have been capable — or indeed willing — to venture the verse in the so-called ‘Great Decade’ of Wordsworth’s power, from the composition Miltonic phrase ‘pretty pinions of blue dusky gauze’ to describe an insect’s wings. But of the Lyrical Ballads with S. T. Coleridge in 1797–8 to the Poems in Two Volumes of more to the point here is Wordsworth’s capacity to wring emotion from a situation 1807. Though no one reads the entirety of Wordsworth’s long catalogue of verse with others might think mundane, something which was to lead the poet into becoming unalloyed pleasure (the second half of his eight decades not being notable for the the butt of satirists’ jokes and reviewers’ scorn in the next two decades (Francis Jeffrey, sustained quality of his writing), in his ten-year pomp the poet changed the nature of the editor of the Edinburgh Review, accused the poet in 1807 of ‘connecting his most modern poetry, and it was in Goslar that Wordsworth began his greatest work. lofty, tender, or impassioned conceptions, with objects and incidents … low, silly, or Common things; ‘I consequently became much attached to it’, wrote Wordsworth uninteresting’). of his kingfisher, the avian friend who had prompted him, in part, to the composition Wordsworth made small things large, made the everyday seem charged with of the ‘Poet’s Epitaph’. All things were instinct with life and meaning for the poet philosophical meaning. However, at this particular moment in time, despite having at this moment in his career. In the kitchen at Goslar, for instance, he looked and Dorothy around, despite the comfort which she afforded and despite the small meditated upon a less fortunate creature than the lovely bird of the frost — a death- miracles of such stuff as the verses on the fly, the poet found it hard to shake off the bound fly, struggling on the oven, its short life ending as it unwisely sought the deadly sense of disappointment and, indeed, failure which he frequently felt in the winter of warmth of a stove. At least Dorothy was here with him, he mused companionably; this

|  | |  | 1798/9. Lyrics on moribund insects were all very well, but such were not what he had his mission. Has it come to this? he thought, and so he wrote: come to Germany to achieve. There were two reasons he was in that country: to learn the language and to work on the The Recluse, the great poem which Coleridge had been Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved encouraging him to write ‘On Man, On Nature, and on Human Life’ (which would, To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song, in the latter’s optimistic vision, be the epochal poem of the age, the Paradise Lost of And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, the nineteenth century). Now both trees appeared to him to be without fruit. The And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice German language was not proving as easy to learn as the French which Wordsworth That flowed along my dreams? For this didst thou, O Derwent, traveling over the green plains had mastered on previous trips to the continent or the Italian he had studied while Near my ‘sweet birthplace’, didst thou, beauteous stream, at Cambridge. The Recluse was also elusive, and he could make no progress with it. Make ceaseless music through the night and day, And Coleridge was gone after their brief stay all together in Hamburg, to society life Which with its steady cadence tempering outwith their means, in Ratzeburg further north, and was headed thereafter to one Our human waywardness, composed my thoughts To more than infant softness, giving me of the great German universities at Göttingen. Perhaps it is not absurd to see ‘The Among the fretful dwellings of mankind Poet’s Epitaph’, which came to Wordsworth in Goslar at the turn of the year 1799, A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm as symbolically — if not literally — telling, indicative of a dread of his own poetic Which Nature breathes among the fields and groves? extinction. Perhaps the slow extinction of the fly was to be a metaphor of his own Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), i. 1–15 poetic fate. And yet. The fact is, however, that Wordsworth by this year’s end in Goslar — Wordsworth wrote quickly and urgently, unaware that this would be a process of without knowing it — had already stumbled upon a hugely important new direction in composition that would last over forty years, in the tortuous birth of his finest long his work. He had begun what is generally seen as his poetic masterpiece, The Prelude, poem. Rather than the The Recluse, eventually left as a mighty fragment, this was the or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind. At some point in October 1798 Wordsworth took up the work which would go down to posterity as the most notable long poem of the age. notebook in which he and Dorothy had recorded their impressions of their Hamburg It was the ‘Poem. Title not yet fixed upon by William Wordsworth, Addressed to S. visit in late September and early October and the pair’s trip south to Saxony. He T. Coleridge’ as the title page to its 1805 manuscript version in thirteen books has it. started to write once more, this time in verse, and he began to express his self-reproach Mary Wordsworth would eventually christen this beauteous child of Wordsworth’s at his inability to work in any sustained manner on The Recluse. He, a chosen one, imagination The Prelude for its first — and posthumous — publication in18 50, the year the man to whom Coleridge, with his immense and obvious talents, was prepared to of the poet’s death. defer, the man who at Cambridge had felt himself destined for poetic greatness, and Here, in his great account of his childhood and early manhood, Wordsworth the man, in particular, fortunate enough to have experienced what he saw as the ideal ‘broods… on his own heart’. In so doing, he delivered himself of one of the founding childhood for a poet — or so it seemed to him — in the English lakes, was failing in

|  | |  | documents of modern verse. The critic Harold Bloom (in his 1982 book Agon: autobiography or, indeed, an unvarnished account of the poet’s youth. Wordsworth Towards a Theory of Revisionism) once wrote that after the Lyrical Ballads ‘the best traced ‘the growth of mental power / And love of Nature’s works’ which he had poetry internalized its subject matter … in the mode of Wordsworth after 1798’. experienced as a ‘child of nature’, to borrow a phrase from the great, final poem of the ‘Wordsworth’, declares Bloom, ‘had no true subject except his own subjective nature, previous year’s Lyrical Ballads, the ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, and very nearly all significant poetry since Wordsworth … has repeated Wordsworth’s on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour’. inward turning’. The second part of this statement is decidedly overstated, but the In tribute verses written the night after he had first heard Wordsworth recite the notion has much truth and critical power; whether post-Romantic in an enthusiastic thirteen-book version of the poem in January 1807, S. T. Coleridge wrote that The sense (the Victorian poetry of Tennyson and Arnold, the twentieth century masters Prelude dealt with ‘the foundations and the building up / Of a Human Spirit’. That W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, and contemporary greats such as Seamus Heaney) building up — the Growth of a Poet’s Mind as Mrs Wordsworth’s eventual subtitle or in an antipathetic manner (in the critical attitudes of the Modernist titans T. S. has it — was achieved, in Wordsworth’s account, by the cultivation of his own, Eliot and Ezra Pound), Wordsworth and his successors have cast a very long shadow powerful imagination at the guiding hands of nature. Though he received an excellent on poetry in the two centuries which have passed since their emergence as the most education by the standards of his day at Hawkshead Grammar, the natural world

controversial and brilliant poets of the late Georgian age. And the greatest moment of was Wordsworth’s real school. The poet Wordsworth attached a remarkable, almost Wordsworth’s ‘inward turning’ was this poem of Saxon provenance, written after the mystical significance to the events of his youth: his experience of nature, his family, Lyrical Ballads but dealing with the events which came before, in the first twenty years and the very shaping of his creative imagination. All a child was to be, he considered, or so of Wordsworth’s life. lies within him in his childhood; ‘The child is father of the man’, as he put it in his Here in Goslar, Wordsworth was writing out his birthright, telling of his Lake famous lyric of 1802, ‘The Rainbow’. And all he was as a poet and a man, he thought, District boyhood, his schooling and his tutoring at the hands of nature as well as by could be explained by the events of his own boyhood in the English Lake District. his family and teachers. In the first book of The Prelude, composed between October 1798 and February 1799, Wordsworth wrote of simple things: of skating, swimming,

playing cards with his school friends, hunting woodcocks, an illicit trip on Ullswater in ii a stolen boat, birds’ nesting, even noughts — and — crosses. He offered recollections Cockermouth and the Derwent of his childhood, but also meditations on the nature and significance of that childhood. A central theme in his work is the formation of the poetic imagination, Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear: notably in the book’s grand credal statements of belief, such as his assertion that Much favoured in my birth-place. the most significant events in his youth were ‘spots of time’, epiphanic moments

which were both educative of his childish consciousness and creatively nourishing to Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), i. 301–3 the adult poet. This was life portraiture of a sort, but it was very far from a simple

|  | |  | At the side of the river Derwent in the market town of Cockermouth, to the north of home. Though Cockermouth is at the confluence of the river Cocker, it is also a place the English lakes, stands a handsome and many-windowed Georgian townhouse — where two rivers meet, and it was the Derwent that both flowed by Wordsworth’s near-mansion. From the moment it was completed in 1745, this was the largest building house and — or so it seemed to him in retrospect — ran through his infant ‘thoughts’. in what was then a one-street settlement and it was there that William Wordsworth The river, a watery synecdoche of the tutelary power of nature that was to shape his was born on 7 April 1770. However, this house, a giant among pygmies, was not owned adult imagination, taught him through its ‘ceaseless music’, a melody which: by the poet’s family. It was the property, rather, of the powerful — and ruthless — local landowner Sir James Lowther (1736–1802), later — from 1784 — the 1st Earl composed my thoughts To more than infant softness, giving me Lonsdale. Lowther was also known by some locals — less impressively but with the Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind bluntness and wit of this part of the north country — as ‘Jimmy Grasp-all’. A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm Lowther was a figure who was to cast a malign shadow over the Wordsworth Which Nature breathes among the hills and groves. children’s lives and fortunes for many years after their father’s premature death. The Prelude (1799), i. 11–15 Wordsworth’s father, the attorney John Wordsworth (1741–83) worked for this man as

a solicitor, land agent and election fixer (Lowther controlled a number of Cumberland ‘Nature’, here personified, was a parental spirit to Wordsworth. That said, and Westmorland ‘pocket boroughs’ in the House of Commons). He had moved into Wordsworthian nature is something rather different from the ‘Mother Nature’ of the the imposing property in 1765 after entering Lowther’s employ, and was married in the popular imagination. For him it was a hermaphroditic presence, so to speak, a force following year to the seventeen-year-old Ann Cookson, the daughter of a prosperous capable of both maternal and paternal ‘ministrations’; Wordsworth described himself Penrith linen-trader William Cookson and his wife Dorothy. as someone ‘Fostered alike by beauty and by fear’. The natural world could teach In Jimmy Grasp-all’s house lay the infant babe, William Wordsworth, the second of softly; it could also be dark, unyielding and punitive. five children, all of whom, fairly unusually by the standards of the day, survived until Whereas his parents died young, nature stayed with Wordsworth throughout adulthood. The poet’s elder brother Richard, to whom he was close only in childhood, his life, as did the recollection of his relationship with nature as a child, whether had been born nigh on two years before, on 19 August 1768. Wordsworth’s one sister, in moments of fear, as he propelled a stolen rowing boat over Ullswater or, indeed, Dorothy, arrived the year after him, her day of nativity 25 December 1771, and was in moments of joy as he skated alone over a frozen Esthwaite Water as a lad at the followed soon after by the births of her younger brothers John (on 4 December 1772) Hawkshead Grammar School. Such incidents might seem mundane, but they were and Christopher, frequently ‘Kit’ (9 June 1774). not so to William Wordsworth. For him they were occasions of epiphany — ‘spots of At the back of the imposing house in which the children were born ran the river. time’ as he called them in The Prelude — which, later in life, were capable of nourishing In the very first lines of the first book of the first version of The Prelude, drafted in the and reinforcing what he denominated the ‘imaginative power’ of the adult poet. German chill of 1799, Wordsworth describes himself, though a mere ‘babe in arms’, ‘Infancy’ and ‘Nature’ — motifs sounded in the opening lines of Wordsworth’s verse listening to the wordless music of the Derwent as it flowed and ebbed outside his

|  | |  | autobiography of his boyhood and early manhood — are central themes in his work. all of his peers. The poet’s deep-felt belief in the significance of childhood memories Wordsworth is the great poet of childhood in English verse. From the descriptions of and his valorization of those recollections in verse was greeted with a chorus of jeers his own youth in The Prelude to his powerful and touching narrative poems dealing by many of the critics and satirists of his day, from Lord Byron downwards, as if the with children such as ‘We are Seven’, ‘The Idiot Boy’ and ‘Alice Fell’, Wordsworth author who wrote so much about infant experience was himself a child. ‘[A]ll who was always attuned to childhood connectivities and to what he saw as the especial view the “idiot in his glory”’, wrote his lordship of Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy’, resonance of the experience of the child. ‘conceive the bard the hero of the story’. A psychoanalytic critic might argue that the poet, who was forced to abandon his Byron’s view now seems eccentric, while Wordsworth’s seems possessed of a first-born child (as the war with Revolutionary France made peaceful intercourse with remarkable modernity. These were new notes he was sounding: Wordsworth is one that country impossible from 1793 onwards), was prompted to such imaginary tales of the patriarchs of the present day, in stressing the importance, even the centrality, and colloquies of children’s lives and deaths such as ‘We are Seven’ and ‘Lucy Gray; of childhood vision and childhood experience in modern culture. And in his own or, Solitude’ by a sense of loss, even guilt. The same critic might also express little conviction, he, William Wordsworth, was particularly fortunate in having the ideal surprise that a poet who lost his mother at the age of seven and his father at the age of childhood, as someone who, as he put it in a letter of 16 Dec 1845, ‘spent half of his

thirteen should be preoccupied with the notion of parenting in his verse. However, it is boyhood in running wild among the Mountains’. Among the mountains, in the river, important to stress here that the poet’s primary attention in his autobiographical work on the lake, under the waterfall; in the beauty of the Lake District, Wordsworth, of all is to the parenting afforded by nature rather than his corporeal parents — who are poets, saw himself as ‘most favoured in my birthplace’.

fairly shadowy presences in all of the various versions of The Prelude bar one or two pivotal episodes — both in the idea of the nourishing maternal presence of nature and the iii attendant and concomitant notion of the natural world acting as a tutelary paternal Cockermouth and Hawkshead force. Whether the relative absence of his parents in The Prelude’s life narratives betokens or symbolises the poet’s actual loss is a moot point and one to which there William Wordsworth did not experience his mother’s ‘dear Presence’ — as he calls it can be no definitive conclusion. in The Prelude — for very long. By the day of his eighth birthday she was dead. But, In a famous paradox, Wordsworth saw another paternal influence evident on his as he looked back on it, Ann Wordsworth’s short life as a mother was, for him, a adult selfhood; ‘The child’, he declared in his 1802 lyric ‘The Rainbow’, ‘is father of vision of love. And she, like the maternal mode of nature itself, served to shape the the Man’. The very familiarity of this great phrase tends to obscure its profundity. man he would become. In a remarkable passage of the 1850 Prelude, one of the few ‘How could he not be?’, we might reply, from our point of vantage after Wordsworth, references to his mother in the poem, Wordsworth imagines himself, a suckling babe, after the Romantics, and after Freud, and in a society which sees the experience imbibing from the breast his mother’s heightened emotional sensibility and, indeed, of childhood as central to the formation of the human consciousness. However, her awareness of nature: Wordsworth’s perception here — as so often in his poetic prime — was not that of

|  | |  | blest the Babe, white sheet. My mother commended my having been present, Nursed in his Mother’s arms, who sinks to sleep expressing a hope that I should remember the circumstance for Rocked on his Mother’s breast; who with his soul the rest of my life. ‘But’, said I, ‘Mama, they did not give me a Drinks in the feelings of his Mother’s eye! penny, as I had been told they would’. ‘Oh’, said she, recanting

Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), ii. 234–7. her praises, ‘if that was your motive, you were very properly disappointed’. The context of the passage makes clear that his words here refer to his own mama,

as well as to the noblest kind of mothers in general. It seemed to Wordsworth in his Mrs Wordsworth seems to have been characterised, in general, by a serenity of eulogy to Ann that his mother, like ‘Nature’, like the Derwent, played a central role in manner and by a kind indulgence to her little flock of children. Certainly she was connecting him with the world around him. His imagery moves from the lactatory to liberal in her treatment of her offspring in terms of giving them leeway to explore and the umbilical: to find adventure. The older boys, and especially William, were very frequently out of No outcast he, bewildered and depress’d: their mama’s sight, to an extent which would seem odd (and perhaps reprehensible) Along his infant veins are interfus’d The gravitation and the filial bond. to some in our modern, arguably more protective, age. Wordsworth frequently roamed Of nature, that connect him with the world. unsupervised through Cockermouth and its rural environs, getting into scrapes such as trapping himself in a dungeon at the town’s castle as well as such acts of derring- Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), ii. 261–4 do and sportive giddiness as stealing birds’ eggs, leap-frogging and racing against his brothers and other boys. As well as such pleasures and naughtinesses, Wordsworth was This rather metaphysical inheritance notwithstanding, in terms of detailed also, as he did throughout his life, here obtaining a personal geography of the places remembrance of his mother, Wordsworth declared that he only recalled vivid details of in which he lived. Cockermouth and Hawkshead, and their surrounding countrysides, Ann in a particular few moments of his childhood, such as the time when she pinned a were the hedge schools of his imagination. nosegay to his breast as he went to say his catechism in church, and her chiding words Poet of nature in embryo he may have been, but as well as looking and observing, when he once went to the same place expecting bounty for his diligence: roaming and playing were William Wordsworth’s delight. Whereas S. T. Coleridge described himself as someone who ‘took no pleasure in boyish sports’, Wordsworth, I remember also telling her on one week day that I had been on the other hand, revelled in them, especially in skating, swimming, running, and in at church, for our school stood in the churchyard, and we had death-dealing activities which were almost unequivocally seen as sports in his day such frequent opportunities of seeing what was going on there. as angling and trapping birds. The occasion was, a woman doing penance in the church in a These pastimes of the country — his reactions to them and experiences of them — are at the heart of the Wordsworthian poetic philosophy, and were very important both

|  | |  | to the child and, later, to the adult poet. In the first hundred lines of the 1799 Prelude, Became my prey; and when the deed was done Wordsworth describes himself bathing in the Derwent — carelessly dashing wild flowers I heard among the solitary hills Low breathings coming after me, and sounds as he ran — and, most strikingly, as ‘a naked savage’ cavorting ‘in the thunder-shadow’ Of undistinguishable motion, steps as the mountain of Skiddaw and its environs were bathed in the fiery incandescence of a Almost as silent as the turf they trod. lightning storm. After this, he describes his eight-year-old self laying traps (‘springes’) to catch woodcocks (game birds of nocturnal habits which are similar to pheasants): Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), i. 42–9

’twas my joy After the hunting woodcocks and the ravens’ nest sublimities, Wordsworth mounts To wander half the night among the cliffs the philosophical soapbox in a clear and explicit statement of belief: And the smooth hollows where the woodcocks ran Along the moonlight turf. In thought and wish That time, my shoulder all with springes hung, I believe I was a fell destroyer. Gentle powers, That there are spirits which, when they would form Who give us happiness and call it peace, A favoured being, from his very dawn When scudding on from snare to snare I plied Of infancy do open out the clouds My anxious visitation, hurrying on, As at the touch of lightning, seeking him Still hurrying, hurrying onward, how my heart With gentle visitation … Panted; among the scattered yew-tress and the crags Others too there are, who use, That looked upon me, how my bosom beat Yet haply aiming at the self-same end, With expectation! Severer interventions, ministry More palpable — and of their school was I.

Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), i. 30–42 Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), i. 68–80

This being Wordsworth, his childhood experiences, though entirely rooted in common circumstance, in the end seem like those of few others. As so often in the ‘spots of In this credal statement, Wordsworth makes the perhaps surprising claim that in the time’ we move from an opening grounded in everyday circumstance to encountering face of ‘a punishing supernatural presence’, we are, as Jonathan Wordsworth once something much stranger, in a turn to the imaginative, if not the uncanny. After wrote, ‘asked to regard his experience as formative, beneficial, evidence that the poet confessing an act of petty criminality in stealing a bird from another’s trap, had been from the first a “chosen son”’. Wordsworth recalls the youthful hunter hearing strange ‘breathings’ among the hills Immediately after this peroration in the Two-Part Prelude, Wordsworth gives, as a pursuing him — and the footfalls of he knew not what. Both of these extraordinary vivid example of these ministrations, an account of the time (probably in the summer 1781 circumstances seemed to express nature’s disapproval of the ‘savage’s’ act: of ) in which at Patterdale, the small but attractive village on Ullswater, he stole a shepherd’s rowing boat and pushed it out on to the waters of the lake. This action, he

Sometimes strong desire maintains, was prompted by the direct intervention of the tutelary spirits: Resistless overpowered me, and the bird Which was the captive of another’s toils

|  | |  | They guided me: one evening led by them to the youthful poet. What are we to make of episodes such as these, a hybrid of I went alone into a shepherd’s boat, the visionary and what we would generally see as ‘real’ experience? The Prelude is A skiff that to a willow tree was tied not meant to be read as an unvarnished memoir and in terms of the plain empirical Within a rocky cave, its usual home. The moon was up, the lake was shining clear ‘truth’ it is most likely that no such thing was occurring. But so it seemed to the child, Among the hoary mountains; from the shore and to the adult poet as he looked back on the most creatively nourishing — though I pushed, and struck the oars, and struck again sometimes fearful — moments of his childhood. We have no reason to believe that the In cadence, and my little boat moved on. poet made up his story of the theft of the boat or exaggerated his childish sense that punishment was nigh. For William Wordsworth, imaginative experience was often as Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), i. 81–88. real as reality itself.

‘It was an act’, writes Wordsworth, ‘of stealth / And troubled pleasure’ (Prelude, Though Wordsworth saw his childhood as resonant with symbolic significance, 1799, i. 90–1), and here again the ministry of fear, so to speak, is evident in his account these ‘spots of time’ are rooted in common experience of boyish adventures. Whatever

of the way in which the youthful miscreant felt himself destined for just punishment its darker shades and whatever its attendant pains, to Wordsworth childhood was at the avenging hands of nature. A huge mountain, it seemed to him, sprang to life charged with a joyous incandescence in which the infant arrives, as he puts it in the and began to chase him, its pursuit the direct result of his morally suspect behaviour: ‘Immortality Ode’, ‘trailing clouds of glory’. Despite the death of his parents and the separation from his sister, and the ‘shades of the prison house’ which, according to … a huge cliff the Great Ode, ‘close around the growing boy’, Wordsworth was convinced that in As if with voluntary power instinct his youth he was frequently among the ‘happiest on earth’ (in The Prelude’s phrase), Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again. and never more so than in his infancy as he swam at the back of the great house in And, growing still in stature, the huge cliff Rose up between me and the stars, and still, the beloved Derwent, his mother unwatching but simultaneously, it seemed to him, With measured motion, like a living thing protective. In The Prelude, Wordsworth takes to the river, and, indeed, talks to the Strode after me. river, here a personified presence which he addresses directly:

Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), i. 108–14 I, a four years’ child A naked boy, among thy silent pools Nature was by no means always a kind and beneficent force in The Prelude; rather more Made one long bathing of a summer’s day often the emphasis is on its sterner ministrations in moments of peril such as this Basked in the sun, or plunged into thy streams. and in the various moments in which Wordsworth recounts his guilt at some boyish Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799), i. 17–20. transgression. In Wordsworth’s remarkable poetic vision, a mountain was capable of administering retribution and ‘strode after’ him, dispensing a rough visionary justice

|  | |  | The Derwent was, to Wordsworth, a kind of literary birthing pool. In a remarkable poetic fragment, ‘Yet once again’, written in 1796 or 1797, which was later echoed in the opening lines of ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth, who famously wrote in the younger poem of the process of poetic creation as the interchange between what we ‘half create, / And what perceive’, portrays the Derwent as possessed of a voice:

Yet once again do I behold the forms Of these huge mountains, and yet once again, Standing beneath these elms, I hear thy voice Beloved Derwent, that peculiar voice Heard in the stillness of the evening air, Half-heard and half-created.

Wordsworth, ‘Yet once again’, 1–6.

In these six lines we see the essence of the Wordsworthian version of Romanticism. Here Wordsworth dwells on the ‘ennobling interchange’ — The Prelude’s phrase — which he saw as giving rise to imaginative creation. And here, as in ‘Tintern Abbey’, great poetry is produced by the fruitful relationship between the natural world and the creative imagination, between ‘the mighty world / Of eye and ear’ and ‘all that we behold / From this green earth’. Nature formed William Wordsworth, but in the modern literary consciousness it is also fair to say that Wordsworth created nature.

‘Poem/Title Not Yet Fixed Upon/by William Wordsworth/Addressed to S.T.Coleridge’ B.R. Haydon Wordsworth on Helvellyn 1843 Title-page of a fair copy of the 1805 Prelude (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust)

|  | |  | Afterword its history; a closed exhibit to be looked at but not read. Most often, however, it is a combination of the text and the artefact that creates a ‘An inspiration for us all’ powerful and engaging exhibit: the representation of words, images and ideas in a form that itself has history and meaning. At the Wordsworth Trust, we are currently preoccupied with a Jeff Cowton, Curator, The Wordsworth Trust number of questions to do with our manuscript holdings of writings by William and Dorothy Wordsworth and members of their circle. How do we stimulate a visitor’s interest in manuscripts without adding more ‘An inspiration for us all’; these are the final words of Nicholas Roe’s words to an exhibition that already requires the act of reading — more Foreword to this book, referring to the legacy of Wordsworth’s writing words added to words? How do we create a learning experience that and ideas. There is inspiration in the poetry itself, however it is makes the most of the visitor being in the presence of the manuscript, reproduced, but further inspiration is also to be found in the tangible and one that goes beyond regarding the manuscript only as a two- form of its first appearance on paper in the manuscripts now held by dimensional holder of text? How do we encourage visitors to notice the Wordsworth Trust at Grasmere. For Wordsworth, the creation and clues in the physicality of the object; to look closely at handwriting revision of new composition was a continuous process, sometimes styles (different pens and hands, or the same hand instructed from ended only by the deadline of the press. It was a process of honing different states of the same mind?); to notice the way the page is poetry through regular revisiting to ‘a perfect form’, achieved through laid out; to investigate how the text changes over time through the a ‘considerate and laborious work’, a ‘slow creation’. It involved not visible evidence of drafts, revisions and additions; to get a sense of the just the poet, but his family, transcribing from dictation and copying manuscript’s creation and history over several generations; to imagine out revised verses into neat, fair copy. These manuscripts hold not just what this physical object, perhaps with words of comfort or love, meant words, but moments in time: their meanings go beyond the words. emotionally to its creator and subsequent owners? Through them we come closer to that moment and to the people. The In essence, how do we enable a visitor to see what at first glance manuscripts that are with us also witnessed the presence of one of the looks like an old piece of paper in a typical museum display, as a thing greatest poets in English literature. with a prior life, which witnessed the lives of people every bit as real as When we view a manuscript in an exhibition, how often do we ourselves, and which describes feelings and thoughts that are as common read but fail to look? And by failing to look, how much do we miss? to us now as they were to the authors from the past? The text and the If we replaced the manuscript with a transcription of its words, what artefact: these are a powerful combination, with great learning potential. visual clues to its creation and history would be denied to the visitor? The Trust has a history of showing art which responds to Occasionally, the words on a manuscript can be less important than

|  | |  | Wordsworthiana. For many years, the 3 Degrees West gallery on its subsequently added to the Wordsworth Gallery. Heather Bowring, who Town End site hosted commissioned exhibitions that responded to the produces tactile, ‘sculptured’, paintings, interpreted Wordsworth’s 1802 Trust’s themes and collections. In 2001, for example, in the exhibition letter to John Wilson (in which he gave his defence of ‘The Idiot Boy’), Pollinate: Encounters with Lakeland Flowers, Rob Kesseler reproduced using raised lettering that encourages the visitor to feel the words images of the manuscripts of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere and from there find them in the manuscript itself (see figure 2). Mike Journals on a Wedgwood white bone china tea service (see figure 1). Collier exhibited two extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals Descriptions of flowers in the journals are almost equalled in number interpreted with his personal response through use of colour (see figure by references to drinking tea; the artist commented that ‘The social act 3). Brian Thompson exhibited ‘Frozen River’, reproduced in this book of drinking tea can be seen as a metaphor for cross-pollination, a fertile (see p.12), a sculpture in which two of the rivers of Wordsworth’s early

Figure 1 exchange where observations gathered each day germinate and take years are represented in shape, with layers in between representing Figure 3 Rob Kesseler Mike Collier ‘Tea and the Wordsworths’ form’. different drafts of lines of verse to which the rivers relate. Daffodils 1 2012 2001 Texts from the Grasmere (From Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry, journals printed on bone China More recently, the Wordsworth Trust has completed research into Evaluation of visitor responses to these pieces showed the value of Friday 16 April 1802) (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) new ways of interpreting its manuscript collections, including the use of such interpretation methods. Commenting on Mike Collier’s pieces, Digital Print 15 x 10 cms (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) contemporary art. A report by Piotr Bienkowski in 2011, commissioned one visitor said, ‘Captures imperfections of the writer’; ‘I thought about by the Trust, recommended that a core principle of manuscript displays the colour splodges as similar to ink blots on the page’. Evaluation should be the involvement of ‘different voices’. These ‘different voices’ showed their effectiveness to be greatest when art and manuscript were would offer new ways of seeing and understanding the manuscript physically close. Focus groups felt that art pieces were an opportunity material and allow alternate routes in for visitors, appealing to a range for the Trust to be more provocative and take risks when highlighting of visitor tastes and learning styles. It was felt that a visual and physical controversial issues. The clear provocation alluding to the word ‘idiot’ artistic response, by its very nature, would draw attention to the in Heather Bowring’s work helped draw some visitors into a debate, a physicality of the manuscript. The current exhibition, Their Colours and technique that could be further exploited in other commissions. their Forms, is part of this process, building upon recent events at the As another part of this process of artistic engagement with the Figure 2 Trust’s Museum and Jerwood Centre. manuscript holdings of the Trust, Alex Butterworth and Stefanie Heather Bowring ‘Idiot Boy’ In spring 2012, as part of the response to this report, contemporary Posavec created a visualization displaying a timeline of Wordsworth’s Sculptured paintings 2002 (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) artists and writers contributed to a conference in Grasmere, ‘Words on greatest poem, The Prelude (see figure 4). Using the twenty-four the Page, and the Meanings Beyond: The Innovative Interpretation of surviving manuscripts of the poem, all written between 1798 and Manuscripts’, that discussed how their responses to manuscripts could 1839 when Wordsworth repeatedly returned to the poem to create create new displays. Three artists’ responses from this conference were its ‘perfect form’, the artists created a fourteen-foot-wide coloured

|  | |  | visualization that conveys the impression of lines and sections being added, changed The report that resulted from the conference and recent innovations, Beyond Words: Understanding and, in some cases, removed from the poem. The visualization contains words, and Sharing the Meanings of Manuscripts (2012), will inform the future interpretation of manuscripts but its power lies in the movement of line and colour in bands wide and thin. It is in the Wordsworth Museum, and the responses of modern artists and writers will feature in new meticulously researched, operating on vertical and horizontal dimensions, with each displays in the main gallery in 2013 and beyond. This wonderful exhibition, Their Colours and their thickness of line in the ‘bar code’ vertical representations of the poem proportionate Forms, is a very welcome and important next step in this development. in size to an actual passage. The viewer is left with an impression of a poem written over forty years, drawing on incidents in early life recollected at different moments in adult life, and modified to lesser or greater degrees until it was prepared for the printer when the poet reached sixty-nine years of age.

Figure 4 Alex Butterworth & Stefanie Posavec Timeline of ‘The Prelude’ |  | Inkjet print using latex inks on wallpaper 350 x 122 cms |  | Notes on Contributors

Tim Brennan Jeff Cowton Since the early 1990s Tim Brennan’s practice and research into the politics of place Jeff Cowton is Curator of the Wordsworth Trust’s collections, a post he has held has surfaced as sculpture, photographs, painting, performance and writing. He has since 1992. Born in Alnwick, Northumberland, he graduated with a degree in history developed a methodology for the guided walk as a discursive performance that he has from the University of Leeds before starting as a volunteer at the Wordsworth Trust termed the manoeuvre that involves the collision of quotations with stopping points in 1981. During his time at Grasmere, he has taken a leading role on several national (stations) along a predesigned route. This approach differs from the conventional initiatives, including spectrum (the uk Museum Documentation Standard, 1997) and guided tour, wrenching the participant into new imaginative and socially charged National Vocational Qualifications for museums. He was chairman of the company perspectives of place. that developed the uk’s most popular cataloguing software for museums. In 2010, he Over forty of these walks have been produced internationally with ten publications was awarded an mbe for services to museums. including The British Museum (2003) and Venice Biennale (2011). Recently Brennan has developed a new approach to wayfaring and the tour via leading cross-platform technologies, software and app production (Durham, 2011 and Sunderland, 2012). David Harsent David Harsent has published nine volumes of poetry. Legion won the Forward Prize for best collection 2005; Night (2011) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His Mike Collier English versions of poems by Yannis Ritsos, In Secret, were published in November Mike Collier is a lecturer, writer, curator and artist. He studied Fine Art at 2102 and will appear in the usa in Spring 2013. Harsent’s Selected Poems 1969–2005 Goldsmiths College before being appointed Gallery Manager at the ica in London. was published in 2007. He subsequently became a freelance curator and arts organiser, working extensively David Harsent has collaborated with composers — most often with Harrison in the UK and abroad. In 1985 he moved to Newcastle to run the Arts Development Birtwistle — on commissions that have been performed at the Royal Opera House, Strategy at the Laing Art Gallery, where he initiated the Tyne International Exhibition the Royal Albert Hall (Proms), the Concertgebouw, the Wales Millennium Centre, the of Contemporary Art. Since 2004 he has worked at the University of Sunderland. Traverse (Edinburgh), the Megaron (Athens), the South Bank Centre, the Aldeburgh Throughout his career, Collier has maintained his artistic practice and much of his Festival and Carnegie Hall in New York. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath work is based around walking. The research undertaken during these walks (the flora Spa University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. and fauna seen are often linked to place-specific social and sometimes political events) is then assimilated in the studio (in Baltic 39 Studios in Newcastle) where he makes permanent art works for exhibition in galleries and on semi-permanent billboards. Collier’s work integrates image and text, often drawing upon the poetic qualities of colloquial names for places, plants and birds. He completed his practice-led PhD at the University of Sunderland in 2010.

|  | |  | Manny Ling Nicholas Roe Manny Ling is a calligrapher, designer and lecturer. He is the Programme Leader for Nicholas Roe’s books include Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (1988), ma Design and the Foundation Degree in Calligraphy and Design at the University of Keats and History (1995), John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1997), and an acclaimed Sunderland. He initiated the special research emphasis on calligraphy at Sunderland biography: Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (2005). He was educated at the since 1999 where he is now Director of the International Research Centre for Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, and Trinity College, Oxford, before joining Calligraphy (ircc). the English Department at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1982. He is now Professor Manny Ling specialises in calligraphy, lettering, typographic design, editorial design of English Literature at the University of St Andrews, a Fellow of the Royal Society of and print-based media. He is the designer and design editor of the edge calligraphy Edinburgh and Chair of the Keats Foundation, Keats House, Hampstead. Roe’s John journal (uk) and has designed numerous publications for various artists, exhibitions Keats: A New Life appeared in 2012. and community projects. Being a Chinese person practising Western calligraphy has had a profound influence on his life. Ling is fascinated by the theme of contrasts and contradictions in his work: East and West, Old and New, Energy and Stillness. He John Strachan has completed his PhD research in the integration of East Asian and Western cultural John Strachan is Professor of English at Bath Spa University. He has masters and influences upon calligraphy. He is also interested in the impact digital media has upon doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford. His books and scholarly editions this traditional art form. include Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (2007), British Satire, Ling has exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions in the uk, France and 1785–1840 (2003), Ireland at War and Peace (2011, with Alison O’Malley-Younger), Key Australia. His work is also featured in many calligraphy, design and typography Concepts in Romantic Literature (2011, with his wife, Jane Moore), and Poetry (2nd edition, publications. He also lectures and conducts workshops in the uk and Europe. 2011, with Richard Terry). His poetry has appeared in several national magazines. With Muriel Strachan he is currently working on a project on the Wordsworth family. Strachan is Associate Editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature, a Fellow of Carol McKay the Royal Historical Society and Treasurer of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation. Carol McKay is a photography lecturer and writer in the Northern Centre of Photography, University of Sunderland. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge and has previously worked at Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. Her current research interests focus on changing patterns of commissioning, exhibiting and disseminating contemporary photography and the relationship between social engagement and developing forms of social media. She is co-editor of a new volume of essays The Versatile Image: Photography, Digital Technologies and the Internet (forthcoming, 2013) and, in collaboration with Professor Arabella Plouviez, she is researching the role of the photographer in the age of the networked image, examining how practitioners adapt and respond to changing technologies. Carol is project manager of the North East Photography Network (www. northeastphoto.net). With Amanda Ritson she is curating the first international festival of photography and lens-based arts taking place in venues across Sunderland and the North East of England in 2013, supported by Arts Council of England.

|  | |  | Robert Strachan Sam Wiehl Robert Strachan is a lecturer and sound artist based at the School of Music at the Sam Wiehl has a design background. He ran the successful multidisciplinary studio University of Liverpool. He holds an MA (distinction) and a PhD, the focus of which Burn Everything for a number of years and was Creative Director at mas Event related to the aesthetics and discourses of diy music scenes. His artistic practice and Design, New York. His work takes the form of installations, film, sound, utilises digital technologies at the intersection between electronic music, audio-visual moving image, music, print and performance. His involvement in the music scene performance and installation art. His solo and collaborative work includes installations has been fundamental in shaping his work and he continues to explore music’s and performances at the bbc Festival of Ideas, Foundation for Art and Creative potential visual narrative and the politics of music culture alongside his interests Technology (fact), Future Everything, Liverpool Biennial, the National Review of in performance and audience participation/response. Recent commissions include Live Art and Tate Liverpool. As part of the Hive Collective, Robert has a track record Liverpool Biennial, FutureEverything, the Bluecoat and Liverpool John Moores in developing numerous innovative electronic music performance, multimedia and live University. He is currently artist in residence at Metal, an interdisciplinary arts lab art events that have received funding from the Arts Council, the prs Foundation for based in Liverpool and Southend. New Music and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Alongside his solo work Sam has collaborated widely with musicians and other Strachan has published on a wide variety of topics related to popular music artists. As a member of the Hive Collective Sam has worked alongside some of the including the mediation of music through such channels as documentary film, music most prestigious artists in contemporary electronic music including Plaid, Matthew video and music biography, music history and the music industry. His current research Herbert, Vladislav Delay and Chris Watson. Sam is also resident visual artist for the on creativity and technology blends research through practice with written scholarly experimental psychedelic rock band Mugstar. work. He is commissioning editor of the scholarly journal Popular Music History, published by Equinox. Tony Williams Tony Williams is a poet, fiction writer and critic. His poetry publications are The Brian Thompson Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street (2009) (shortlisted for the Aldeburgh, Portico Brian Thompson graduated from Newcastle University in 1975 with an mfa in and Michael Murphy Memorial Prizes) and All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head (2011) (a Sculpture. He has been awarded numerous prizes including the Pernod Prize and the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice). He has also published a collection of flash Peter Stuyvesant Art Prize. His work has been seen through exhibitions, collections fiction, All the Bananas I’ve Never Eaten (2012). Williams is Lecturer in Creative Writing and lectures in Europe, usa and Asia including The Condition of Sculpture, Hayward at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, where he is currently undertaking Gallery, London; The Paris Biennale; The British Art Show; Sculpture Trails Museum, ahrc-funded research into dog-walking, everyday life, and creative writing practice. Indiana; the Ironbridge Museum of Steel Sculpture; Central House of the Artists, Moscow and the Guangdong Museum of Art, China. He was a pioneer of practice- based doctorates in Art & Design, being Director of Studies of one of the first PhD completions in Sculpture in 1992. Thompson is Professor of Sculpture and Associate Dean for Research in Arts, Design and Media at the University of Sunderland. He is a founder member of the University of Sunderland’s Walking, Art, Landskip and Knowledge (w.a.l.k.) research group. Brian Thompson’s studio is in North Yorkshire, where he lives with his wife Jane.

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